On snow being general.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Joyce is most remembered for his pyrotechnical technique — the word plays, the language creation, the ability to intricately plot the criss-crossing of three lives, Stephen, Molly, and Bloom, as they skip back and forth between myth and reality.

Long have I been an acolyte.  Many are the rites I have performed.  I climbed the Martello Tower at Sandymount, just outside Dublin, breathless not from the climb but from the view of the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.  I found my way through a warren of streets to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where Ulysses was first published.  I made the pilgrimage to Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.
 
And yet, in the end, it is this passage from “The Dead” — poetic and not pyrotechnic — that is my most powerful Joycean memory.

I read it first almost forty years ago — tender and callow, then — and it seeped into my subconscious.  Each year, with the first snowfall, it comes back to me in a mood of melancholy.  And each year the resonances, like arcing spirals in a Bach solo cello suite, keep building on each other.

I used to wonder how Joyce wrote such a work in his late 20s.  I’ve given up trying to figure that out, chalking it up to genius.

This year, I see its intersection with the Nativity story.  Actually, it is the flip side.  Quietly, somewhere in the night, upon all of us, hope is falling gently. 

Do you see what I see?