In my twenties: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Amerika, Nausea. Joyce, Kafka, Sartre; the three I returned to as touchstones. I reread Nausea every year. But Portrait I avoided.
Not because I thought less of it, but because I was not sure how much of myself I had poured into the book the first time, and what would remain if I read it again.
Now, rereading it, I find no need to explain. The book is exacting.
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
It is not the image. It is the poise. The sentence, quietly complete, pauses inside you.
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