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I read Ulysses over seven days in 2010. I had just finished my first year in graduate schoolhouse in New York, and for that week in May all I did was read Ulysses. I didn't take many friends, I didn't go out, I was lonely, my roommate went home for the summertime, and so I stayed up reading Joyce.

I didn't read the Gifford annotations, and oft I barely knew what was happening. I did, even so, understand this part, about a quarter of the mode through the book: Leopold Blossom sits in Davy Byrne's pub, eating "with relish of cloy" a Gorgonzola cheese and mustard sandwich. As he'due south washing the food bits downwardly with a glass of burgundy, he remembers the moment he proposed to his wife, Molly, at Howth Head:

Ravished over her I lay, total lips full open up, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my rima oris the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her optics were, accept me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-ane. Loftier on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened nether ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, adult female's breasts full in her blouse of nun'south veiling, fatty nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

I couldn't believe it. Information technology was 1 of the near beautiful passages I'd ever read.

Because this is Joyce, it's worth going over the details. The fact that Bloom and Molly are alone, the location of Howth Head (if yous don't know what it looks like, delight look up pictures), that'due south all very storybook romantic, but what makes this passage is the messiness of it. A goat is shitting right next to them, for heaven'south sake. And the buss itself: Molly pushes a seedcake, which she has partially masticated, into Bloom's mouth with her tongue, and he tastes her spittle and the stickiness of her lips. In a volume about the momentous and the mundane, this passage is an intersection of both. It's a moment that'south completely full. It'south a moment that's alive, wriggling like a tongue.

Writing about Ulysses is kind of like increasing the world's pollution. At this indicate, at that place's so much well-nigh the volume it'southward difficult to tell what of it matters, and how much. It all sort of cancels itself out. In fact, in that location's so much personal writing nigh the volume on top of all the straightforward criticism that at this point even writing about your own feeling and reaction to Ulysses feels extraneous and unnecessary. Didn't someone already say exactly what you want to say in much better words? And and then how do you write near the seedcake kiss, one of the most famous moments in one of the most famous novels ever written? Xxx years agone, twenty years agone, ten years ago, didn't another guy in his early on twenties motion to the Eastward Village and feel the pleasure of his loneliness and stay upward late at night in his apartment and plow through Joyce, get to the seedcake kiss and experience the beauty of the writing positively blank out his encephalon, causing him to end and reread it over and over once again until he could just brainstorm to understand why he found it so beautiful, but not for too long because he even so had ten episodes to go, though he underlined information technology in his copy, and a calendar month, a year later, later on he'd finished the book and had read a few other books, flip through until he found information technology, and so read it again?

Joyce returns to the kiss 500 pages later, saving it for the last 39 lines of the entire book. Past giving usa how Molly remembers the kiss, the messiness propagates: "My God after that long kiss I near lost my breath… and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say aye and I wouldnt respond get-go only looked out over the sea and the heaven I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of." Molly thinks of sleepy donkeys slipping, 1000-year-onetime castles, half-open up wineshops at night, castanets, the sea, figtrees in the Alameda gardens. The seedcake kiss isn't a representation, it'south the part of a life that we have no proper name for, information technology's something just as of import as goat currants and tired donkeys, it's fertile potential and the affair we want more of, it's all we have, it'south a first-class, fallacious fluke.

And so this:

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask once again yes and and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him downward to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going similar mad and yes I said yep I will Yes.

The Buss is a bimonthly series curated past Brian Turner.

The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers  is available from Norton in February 2018.

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