A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJoyce, James
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce, James
Artists -- Fiction; Autobiographical fiction; Bildungsromans; Dublin (Ireland) -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of
ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in
purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the
spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous
ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer,
since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted
by way of suffrage for the agonising souls; and fearful lest in the
midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the infernal only in
that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a
drop of moisture, he drove his soul daily through an increasing circle
of works of supererogation.
Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of
his station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy.
His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word and
deed, every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate
radiantly in heaven; and at times his sense of such immediate
repercussion was so lively that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion
pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register and to see
the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not as a
number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender flower.
The rosaries, too, which he said constantly—for he carried his beads
loose in his trousers’ pockets that he might tell them as he walked the
streets—transformed themselves into coronals of flowers of such vague
unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and odourless as
they were nameless. He offered up each of his three daily chaplets that
his soul might grow strong in each of the three theological virtues, in
faith in the Father Who had created him, in hope in the Son Who had
redeemed him and in love of the Holy Ghost Who had sanctified him; and
this thrice triple prayer he offered to the Three Persons through Mary
in the name of her joyful and sorrowful and glorious mysteries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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