The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedDarcy O'Brien
Title QuotedConscience of James Joyce
Date (Year/Month/Day)1968/07/09
Imprint 
QuotationWent and lay down dopey for ½ hour, then got up and looked for something new. So Darcy O'Brien on The Conscience of Joyce. Not a marvelous book itself (a bit obvious"”and limited perspectives), but Joyce himself woke me up again and now I am very involved in it. Dedalus's aesthetics. The essentially contemplative vocation of joyce. His revolt is that of the contemplative and creative man called to self-transcendence and "held down" by the prosaic, legalistic, provincial Catholicism of the Irish middle class"”the bourgeois Catholicism of the 19th century"”which continues in another form in the 20th"”liberal, pragmatic, pedestrian, "practical," exalting matter and science, etc. and still putting down contemplation as "gnostic," "unchristian," enemies of the imagination, but not really earthy either. O'Brien tends to give Joyce this same stereotyped business: "rejection of the faith" (the girl standing in the water), "hatred of life." (How can he say such a thing? Surely he'll take that back.)
Quotation SourceThe Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 7, 1967-1968.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1998, p. 140
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