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Dilemma, Trilemma or Quandary? (Cecilia Peartree)

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I had planned to write about the actual writing situation that led me to ask the above question, but instead I found myself wondering if ‘trilemma’ is a real word or not, as I imagined I had probably coined it myself. During my investigations in various online dictionaries, however, I’ve discovered that not only is it a real word but that the word has existed for a few centuries and the concept for a good deal longer. In the middle of my trilemma search, I realised that ‘quandary’ was a more accurate term for my state of mind, as it would not restrict me to two or three options but was much more vague and open-ended than that - though looking at the structure of the word carefully I very much wanted it to mean a problem with exactly four possible solutions. In any case, it seems that a trilemma is often used in a very exact way, to refer to problems in economics or computing, so it would be quite unsuited to solving the less quantifiable question of what to do next. Anyway, I will leav...
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Trieste, in search of epiphany by Peter Leyland

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Trieste, in search of epiphany        I have spent the past week in Trieste with my wife in search of something, I don’t quite know what - perhaps I imagined that the ghost of James Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, would reach me there? In my very battered copy of  Stephen Hero , repaired with ageing Sellotape - a book which was not published in Joyce’s lifetime - there is a definition of what I was looking for. The artist, Stephen, walking on a Dublin street and feeling restless, pauses as he passes a set of area railings to listen to the fragment of a conversation between a young lady and a gentleman. Stephen’s mind turns to the idea of gathering such moments together in a book of epiphanies: “By an epiphany he (Stephen) meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they t...
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