The point?

I’m lying in bed reading Joyce – “Ulysses”. 

I’ve been playing guitar most of the afternoon and evening.  It’s a spiritual / religious thing, that’s all.  A kind of meditation.  I’ll never be a performer.

My mind lurches back to Facebook – I’d been scrolling through it in the park earlier: so much crap, so much past, so much of nothing that really means anything anymore.  I’m thinking of a former associate.  I can hear him asking: “What does reading Ulysses or any of that crap add?  What’s the fucking point?”  And he’s got me.  What is the fucking point?

I close the Kindle and put it down on the table, stretching back and easing my head onto the pillow.  As I stare at the bare ceiling, an answer seems to come down to me.

To be honest, I don’t really know what the whole thing is about.  I don’t know what literary devices are being used.  I don’t pretend to have a critic’s knowledge of what’s going on.  I even struggle to remember what I read a few days or weeks ago, but…

There’s a kind of aesthetic in those pages; something that keeps me turning them, even having put them aside for weeks.  There’s an elegance of some kind in the language and, deep in the swirl of narrative, of characters and the words they utter, lies an erudite knowledge of life, literature and the Arts going back to the Greeks.  Somewhere in what seems abstract and impenetrable at times is a detailed and incisive observation of us. It's a shape moving, shadowlike, behind that swirl of words.

"Overthinking is the biggest cause of our unhappiness": that was it.

But perhaps awareness and shared humanity are the things that make us whole – or a part of the whole.  Maybe owning this knowledge helps us see others as we see ourselves.  Maybe if we could just achieve that, human existence might not be the vision of hell that it has so often been.

Maybe that’s the fucking point.