Joyce Stick

There’s never enough time in the day. But, of course, how could we ever have time if we never make time? Isn’t that what the devil said?
So I’m making the time to read James Joyce, and finding myself fascinated by the extended sermon on Hell that takes up a vast portion of chapter three. The hero of the novel, Stephen Deadelus (the author’s semi-autobiographical avatar) spends most of said chapter embroiled in guilt over the nightly bouts of in-and-out he’s indulged in since the end of chapter two. Poking and prodding him toward repentance is the sermon on Hell delivered
It’s a particularly Catholic vision of Hell—five hundred years of over-thinking and categorical sub-dividing. The sheer uniformity of it leaves a down right institutional aftertaste in my mind. The way every sense of body and soul is assigned its special torment, the unflinching, ponderously serious detail of it, strikes me down and tries my patience, much as the book itself tries my patience. There’s none of Dante’s Twilight Zone-brand of justice in James Joyce’s Irish Catholic Hell. None of John Milton’s haughty, fuck-you-I’m-English rebellion. Certainly none of Richard Matheson’s good ol’ America melodrama. It’s (if you’ll pardon the phrase, which I know you won’t) on Hell of a depressing pit of eternal damnation, devoid of even the Inferno’s saving grace: its manifold variance. The depraved imagination of a single politically-minded fourteenth Century Italian has a lot on the institutional imagination of the Holy Mother Church.
I shouldn’t be surprised, given the amount of energy wasted on pondering the after life. Visions of it fill volumes, and spill out across the world. Stacked together they’d reach the moon and fall on that plaque with Nixon’s name on it.
Would that human beings put more energy into examining their own lives, and the neglected world that they inhabit. We might all be better off.