"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 harmonized 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?"
James Joyce (A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
We
“think not in words but in shadows of words. James
Joyce… gives too much verbal body to his thoughts”
(SO,p.30)
I could not find the original words by Paul
Valéry on "autobiography" ( form and content)