/lit/ - Literature

I'm feeling so bad today. I'm suffering one of those moods in which i wish i could just lay down on the ground and sink into the earth. I feel like sleeping on the hard floorboards tonight, just to feel closer to the ground. I want to melt away. I want to decompose or be pressed beneath a heavy weight. I would like to whinge, but I have resolved myself against it. I don't want to feel self-pity any longer. And yet, I wish I yearn for some sort of relief. So I will just post one of my favourite passages:

>The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognise as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:

>—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.