"Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce, Ulysses.

Trieste, Italy, where Joyce first began penning the epic and moving novel about everything powerfully all at once, without reprieve.

As I toil away at my Fulbright application for a potential writing grant in Italy (with a fantasized permanent relocation afterwards), Joyce's own personal triumphs, travails and emigrations move along similar pathways with my mind, the words echo, his own rails pitted against his native land and his reasons for leaving synch with mine, and this image above, along with rereading Joyce for the umpteenth time and sort of swallowing up that fierce and tirelessly humane esprit, gives me both joy and hope.

Brief tangental PSA: Ulysses is a book whose gorgeousness, insight, and pure jouissance exceeds so much of the fiction out there I often genuinely feel bad that so many people are cheated out of the pleasure of reading it courtesy of far too many trumped-up charges citing its purposeful difficulty, its modernist posturing, its inaccessibility, and so on; none of that's true. Yes, it's playful; yes, it's demanding. But it's also, and most importantly, a wonderful read and in its celebration of the human body and the human being a vital one; that it requires patience and concentration, as all good books should, is no reason to ignore it.