Trieste, in search of epiphany by Peter Leyland
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...