It‘s gotta be better than The Waves, right?

“Every word is so deep, Leopold." Ulysses, p.62
Nothing is as Irish as James Joyce‘s Ulysses. Happy and safe St. Patrick‘s Day!
In another life, I‘d be a James Joyce scholar.

“Mom would outdo herself at momness” (p. 16).

"With his heart overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving" (p. 1254).

" 'But truth's a menace, science is a public danger.' " Sounds like Trump and his henchmen. ???

When you love a book so much that you even find yourself discussing it in your dreams. ☺️

I brought in reinforcements.

In my next life, I'm coming back as a Joyce scholar.

"'There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it-hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off" (p. 315). Though this statement was being made about anti-Semitism in America in the 1940s, its sentiment rings true today.

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space...today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story."

"' I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all of these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art'" (p. 196).

"'You [Blacks and poor Whites] are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.'"

"The dance of the compliant [Black] sharecropper conceding to the big [White] planter year in and year out made it seem as if the ritual actually made sense, that the sharecropper, having been given no choice, actually saw the tilted scales as fair. The sharecropper's forced silence was part of the collusion that fed the mythology." A mythology that looms large more than 75 years later. ?

Kahneman presents summaries of his groundbreaking research on cognitive biases, heuristics, errors in judgment, decision making, and well-being. Many of the errors he describes may account for the ubiquity and proliferation of fake news, as well as account for the ability of politicians to wield fear and misinformation as weapons to get ahead. Add this book to your arsenal to defend yourself against such perfidy.

"We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller...Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us."