Three Lines
You know how sometimes you get lines from songs stuck in your head? Not necessarily the music, but the lines themselves. Well I do anyway. Lines like “And still we will be here, standing like statues” or “do you believe in magic?”, though they’re much better with the music to go with them, and when they’re sung in a certain way. Lately I’ve had a few literary lines stuck in my head, two of them from James Joyce, one from Simon Armitage. Sometimes the best sentiments come from the fewest words, and some quotes are brilliant not because of what they say, whether they’re a pithy little aphorism or a well-put piece of rhetoric, but by what they suggest, and how they seem to carry a whole weight of ideas that is much greater than the sum of their parts.
Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:
i. Yes I said yes I will yes.
This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.
ii. Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands.
This is the opening line of my favourite Simon Armitage poem. I don’t know why I like this line so much, but it’s ambiguous and sort of loving. Perhaps I just project onto this line the weight of the rest of the poem, and that’s why it gives me such a sense of the enduring importance of a mother to her grown-up son.
The same is probably true of the first line, that it resonates so strongly for me because of its context within the novel, but the last line, the one I’ve been thinking about most, does not have much context for me, because I only read it recently, and it’s from a novel I haven’t yet read. According to the short story I first read it in, it’s one of the most famous lines Joyce ever wrote, but a google search turns up almost nothing about it. I feel it stands on its own merits, without context, as an excellent line, though it is only four words:
iii. Is love worse life?
It sort of doesn’t make sense, but it’s from Finnegans Wake, so that’s to be expected. I’m not sure I can really explain what it means, not any better than it explains itself, but I’m sure it means something. It’s the kind of sentence you can go away and think about. At least that’s how I feel. I also feel that James Joyce should be taught at school instead of Shakespeare. Both are difficult, but Joyce is difficult because of his linguistic experimentation, not because his language is archaic like Shakespeare’s. And in terms of wordplay and clever expression, Joyce is at least Shakespeare’s equal, if not his better. Well, I’m not going to go too far into this, but I’m passionate about James Joyce, while Shakespeare just feels out-dated, good for his day, but past his prime.
And that’s it, I really just wanted to share those three sentences. A follow-on to the last Videogame Diaries will be up soon.
Tags: Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, monologues, quotes, Shakespeare, Simon Armitage, Ulysses
