A Synchronicity

I'm not sure it's reasonable of me to invoke Jung's acausal connecting principle regarding what happened to me today, but I do know that a distinct spookiness embraced me for a good twenty minutes or so in the middle of the day, and still lingers. But perhaps the whole thing can be simply put down to YouTube's algorithm getting it right for once.

To explain my experience I need to go back to Wednesday and a conversation I had with Maria which touched upon the notion of Beauty. I'd semi-playfully referenced the on-going War on Beauty to her and she rightly asked me what exactly I meant by Beauty. I brilliantly avoided directly answering her question by seeking to look appropriately wise and saying something evasive. But later in the day I felt a bit guilty about this and started thinking of how I might provide some kind of genuinely fruitful answer. Which in turn got me thinking about the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his chum Lynch in Joyce's A Portrait referencing Aquinas's thoughts on the subject. Since Maria is essentially a good Catholic girl this seemed a particularly appropriate place to start; plus it remains my own reference point for understanding a concept which happily lies beyond my limited understanding.

Anyway, I've not seen Maria since but I thought I'd better reread the apposite pages from Chapter 5 just to check if they remained as brilliantly illuminating as I remembered them. So I read them around 10.00 am today, sitting in the library as it happens, and, my goodness, they were better than ever. And, then, to some small astonishment from myself, around noon, a lecture with the unlikely title Islamic Influences on James Joyce popped up in the YouTube feed on my phone.

It took me roughly 10 minutes into Tim Winter's talk to realise that some five decades of thinking on my part about Joyce's art, including Stephen & Lynch's momentous dialogue, was coalescing into a series of insights that I can only characterise as deeply exciting. And now, having listened to the full lecture I find the initial excitement hasn't really subsided, but transformed, as these things do into something rich and strange.

Still processing.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, in between and around all this I did get quite a bit of work done.)