James Joyce In Space

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What do you think about when you look at the stars in the night sky?


Every June 16, the day fans of novelist James Joyce celebrate “Bloomsday”–the fictional date when Leopold Bloom wandered around Dublin in Joyce’s most famous novel, Ulysses.


Joyce never wrote science fiction, but he wrote some gorgeous descriptions of the cosmos. We find inspiration in all corners of reality—including classic literature with a powerful voice.


You should download a free eBook copy of Ulysses. In that book, Bloom stares up at the night sky, seeing “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”



Joyce followed that sentence with one of the loveliest descriptions of space and time I’ve ever read:



Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.”


— James Joyce




Joyce followed with a meditation on life at the smallest scale, a cosmic counterpoint:



Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.


— James Joyce










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Ulysses by James Joyce is one of those books that fills the young aspiring novelist with both soaring inspiration and deepest depression.


Ulysses is the inner monologue of one man on one day. The ultimate blog. The quotidian is presented as miraculous as it really is.  The problem is, having read this book begs the question:  Need you ever read another book, let alone spend a lifetime trying to write another novel of such scope and profundity?  Where do you go beyond utter perfection?   Hence the depression and consideration of exploring other forms of artistic expression.  So I dare you, young word-slinger, firing off your hot ink e-bullets all over the ‘net.  Read Ulysses.  Then take a few days to decide what to do with the rest of your life.  Whether you choose to write on or take up the accordion, I wish you best of luck.










Your Thoughts




  1. Have you ever considered ‘Why you write’?
  2. Have you always wanted to be a writer?
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NoireMoonshine's avatar

The world is a bar of lemon soap in the pocket of a fiddling man.