Estos son los fragmentos que más me llamaron la atención de A portait of the artist as a young man, de James Joyce. Ha sido un libro que he disfrutado bastante. A medida que pasaba las páginas, me iba encariñando más y más con Stephen Dedalus, el protagonista, con el que me identifico en prácticamente todo.
Puedo asegurar casi con total seguridad que Stephen es uno de los personajes ficticios que más me ha gustado.
He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.
He wondered had he been in her thoughts as she had been in his.
He recalled his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind.
What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?
Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.
He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.
He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand -- that is art.
Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can.
