Scan barcode
A review by naokamiya
Ulysses by James Joyce
5.0
Much like I was with “Moby Dick”, I am once again tasked with the unenviable baggage of reviewing a work of art that has totally changed the course of its respective medium’s history, and am left scrambling for words to articulate what the author has said well enough within the monumental nature of the work itself. I am a measly twenty-something lit geek with minimal life experience, attempting to review a book of this scope and influence - it’s kind of inherently an egotistical act, when put that way, right? But I think I and anyone else is qualified to review this book, because in no circumstances is Joyce’s ego not significantly bigger than mine, by wide margins in fact. And I tell you what - thank whatever god[s] there are for that a thousand times over. Because without Joyce’s ego, his absolute confidence in jumping headfirst into the construction of this game-changing leviathan of a work, then not only would this inarticulable masterpiece not exist, but the rest of literary history in the 20th century and beyond might as well be thrown out with it. I may not know how to articulate the entire scope of this monster [who could, save Joyce himself?], but what I do know with certainty is that I can finally say that I have read “Ulysses”. And to that I say - big fucking whoop. There is so fucking much to unpack in this novel that this is a vortex you will have to look into many times to unravel its secrets, and even then I can imagine nobody could possibly get everything here, even the most seasoned Joyce scholars. It occupies the one space in art that I cherish maybe above all others, that of the Primal, it is something that feels like it has always existed and does not have to be Understood as much as Felt, and I feel this deep in my soul and I know I’m not the only one because of how wide ranging and unavoidable the influence of the novel is. I guess what I’m saying is, I see why this is considered among peak works of modern art across mediums, because like, there’s really no way it couldn’t be. It is the human experience in print, a sheer distillation of each and every one of our lives on this spinning space rock in the middle of nowhere, all of it examined from every angle you can think of by means of the most specific particulars possible. How many books can you say that of?
And for as much as I devalue my own ability to understand and compartmentalize this entire thing vs. feel it [and I’m always much better at the latter, not just with this kind of book], I have to be nice and give myself some credit here. I first opened “Ulysses” at a library when I had just finished high school about half a decade ago now, and got pretty much immediately filtered by “Telemachus”, thinking “there’s no way I can finish this thing in two weeks”. I was just getting back into books then, or trying to, which is sort of like trying to get seriously into music by jumping straight into Stravinsky or something. Ever since then, “Ulysses” has been on my personal Mount Rushmore of books to conquer in my lifetime, a sort of ominous distant threat like the opening boss of a game that you’re supposed to die to that you can finally face again halfway through with better equipment and stats. But while I didn’t “conquer” this upon finishing it, obviously, it’s still an experience I feel accomplished for, and one that’s even more exciting because I know this book is now forever waiting for me to return to it as many times as both of us want, and that’s a feeling that keeps me so invested in “difficult” works like this.
That brings me to the elephant in the room - “Ulysses” is as difficult as people say it is, without a doubt. It’s probably the hardest book I’ve read front to back, significantly tougher than “Gravity’s Rainbow”, which I’d put on a similar wavelength of erudition and abstraction, but where the difficulty of Pynchon’s masterpiece lies in his labyrinthine composition, the difficulty of Joyce’s lies in the fragmentation employed here. That’s not to say “Ulysses” isn’t vast in its scope - in some ways it’s even more wide-ranging than “Rainbow” - but it’s a different kind of massive, less of a maze to be traversed and more of a collection of separate-but-equal moving parts zipping along at varyingly different speeds, and Joyce just trusts that you’re going to have to keep up with it all. Joyce uses style as the pillars that uphold all these moving parts - the book explodes in a phantasmagoria of different styles, pastiches and compositional frameworks, to the point where you will never know what to expect being hit with on any given page, especially in episode nine and beyond. This makes “Ulysses” feel distinctly chaotic in its extensive reach, and it really does feel urban - the way Dublin is portrayed feels almost symphonic, a starburst of sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feelings and just everything in an overwhelming expanse, and it’s felt even when we’re looking deep into Bloom and Stephen’s brains.
So, yeah, it’s not an easy read. And - I’m not going to say it’s fun, necessarily, because not all of it is, and there are certainly some moments that don’t stimulate my brain faculties as much as others [and those moments are inevitable, as the story really is mundane at its core] - but it is enjoyable and funny the whole way through, and Joyce’s playfulness and confidence not only in the unprecedented structuring of the novel but also in his ability to depict the chaos of thoughts that run through our heads daily, it all adds up to a book where there’s never a dull moment if you can just read between the lines and place yourself on the wavelength of what J.J. is doing here. The near infinity of Stuff contained here means that there’s something different for literally anyone to hold on to, and furthermore Bloom, Stephen and Molly are just wonderfully lovable, distinct characters whose existences are probably the closest to living, breathing people you could conceivably get.
Vit’s review said it so much better in a much less convoluted fashion than my ramblings but it’s just so interesting how this book really elevates an average day in an average life to an Epic scale by just showing every angle such a quotidian thing could be approached, while also lowering the concept of the Mythic Epic to a much more human and relatable standard, essentially demystifying the latter while inundating the former with cosmic magic. And that’s a big thing I got out of this novel in general - a recontextualization of narratives we’ve taken for granted, be it that of both Story [such as Homer’s Odyssey] or Life [the totally run-of-the-mill day of a working class Jew in Ireland in 1904]. Lives aren’t stories, but stories also inform our lives, and all stories, even the most fantastical and grandiose, are informed by our lives. James Joyce was, I’m not going to say he was totally average because of his genius and life trajectory, but he was a person, he had all the fears, hopes, anxieties, and thoughts that anyone else does, and here he is writing a story of this immensity and universality - to a point, this very novel almost feels like a statement that anyone with the wherewithal could make their own “Ulysses”, because if one can tackle their take on the totality of the human experience then literally anyone else with thoughts could. This is getting on some New Age-y rambling, so I’m just going to move on from this paragraph, but yeah - there’s a really moving Meta Statement that I got out of this, that we’re all from different walks of life but all capable of our own daily Odysseys and every single day is one chapter in our own personal epics, and whose to say we couldn’t ourselves contain this in our own art?
While reading this throughout the past month I couldn’t help but thinking about how this must have felt to read when it came out vs. now, when we have all the historical context and hindsight of its age and its impact on literature. Like, can you imagine just being an average Bloom him/her/theirself reading this a hundred years ago? It was probably totally beyond the scope of anything else being written at the time, it was difficult enough to wrap my mind around even with all the context of literary maximalism, experimentalism and postmodernist excess that our current generation has come to know, so I can’t imagine how much of a mindfuck it must have felt like back when it was first published. And this thing’s DNA really is everywhere - you couldn’t ask me specifically which [I’d have to go through my marginalia and I wrote a LOT], but I noticed tons of stuff here that’s been referenced elsewhere throughout all art mediums since, like there’d just be something and I’d be like “oh hey that’s an album title isn’t it?” So it’s kind of disappointing seeing people say stuff like life is too short to read this book or that the average person shouldn’t read it, because honestly with how vastly this can be applied to both art and our lives and how much of it is informed by its completely non-average Averageness like…I think life’s too short not to read it, and you should read it. If you like art, like at all, you should read this. Or at least attempt it, because even if you won’t understand everything, there’s stuff here that you will undoubtedly get because it is so baked into modern cultural DNA. Joyce wasn’t lying at all when he said he had put enough stuff in here to ensure the novel’s immortality; he’s done so with flying colors, and that it not only still persists, but does so abundantly throughout our culture just means all we can do at this point is give the guy posthumous Ws on all fronts. Thanks for predicting the entirety of modern history James!
That last comment’s a joke, obviously, but only so much honestly. And really, that quote by Joyce I alluded to in the last paragraph, is another thing that makes this novel as immensely interesting to me as it is. There's a profoundly negative approach we tend to take when talking about the process of Creation, especially of art, that we have to suppress our confidence, suppress positivity toward our own efforts, be totally fucking Judgmental and Critical of absolutely everything we make or else we'll never become better, apparently. This is certainly something I struggle with immensely as a writer, too. And while Joyce no doubt probably ran into unbelievable frustration writing this masterwork [how could he not have?], the statement of just making this alone not only implies confidence, but he's outright boastful about it. And why shouldn't he be? This really is a masterpiece, an utterly timeless and universal work, and Joyce knew it, so he has every right to boast. "Our national epic is yet to be written," he winks in episode nine of this novel. Maybe believing in oneself, being confident in one's own Averageness to do something great, create something great, whatever - maybe that's a fucking great thing actually, maybe it's a worthwhile defiance of the capitalist lie we've all been fed that the worse the pain, the more fruitful the result. Joyce certainly knew he could write something great, that the frustration would be worth it, that he was crafting something that would leave a mark on history. And like, sure, most of us will not be at the sheer level of James Joyce but it doesn't fucking matter, we ALL have the capability to do good and create great stuff in our own ways, and the point I'm getting at here is that it's okay to believe in yourself, to have faith in art and yourself to leave an impact, even in the most infinitesimal ways. We are all Bloom and Stephen and Molly and we're all just going through the motions and there's no reason not to be kind to yourself and others because we all make our own marks, no matter how small our lives are. Write your own indulgent epic if you want, because in many ways life is our own indulgent personalized epic as much as it's totally average, and never forget to be kind to yourself. Please. You deserve that, at the very least you do, I promise.
Episode 9 "Scylla and Charybdis": This is the first chapter that totally convinced me I was reading a work of brilliance so I couldn't refrain from placing it in my top five. I know practically zilch about Shakespeare but there's just so many layers of total cleverness and insight to this one, as well as just being somehow fun amidst all of Stephen's neurotic academic jargon - the metatextual parallels between Stephen and Joyce being compared with the proposed meta relationship between Shakespeare and Hamlet, the Anne Hathaway pun, Buck's stupid play, the remark of Bloom checking out the statue of Aphrodite's ass, Joyce's aforementioned boasting; the whole thing is just this amazing metafictional wink at the reader completed with absurd dashes of Joycean humor. Smart and ridiculous as hell at the same time and I totally love it.
Episode 12 "Cyclops": Someone told me this is the chapter supposedly most people hate - what?? This is an utterly madcap vortex through like a dozen mind-bending absurdist pastiches of heroic folk myths of yore and an intrusion upon the text by wildly hilarious flights of supernatural fancy, all in service to a narrative that directly interrogates European nationalism and antisemitism, leading to a conclusion in which our boy Bloom has the clearest emotional victory we see him achieve throughout the entire novel. And Joyce is insane and genius enough to make this entire thing work despite how many apparently disparate moving parts it's comprised of. I feel like this one and "Circe" in particular both predicted postmodernism more than any other chapters, so of course I adore it.
Episode 15 "Circe": This is nothing short of one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had with literature all year. Everyone and everything - and I do mean EVERYTHING - in the novel seen beforehand is taken into a literary blender and vomited up in a fucking garish and lewd and hilarious and beautiful and grotesque phantasmagoric nightmare carnival tour of the psychedelic dreamscapes of Bloom and Stephen's absinthe-addled brains as they romp through Dublin's red light district. Absolutely everything is free associative, things morph and shift and blend into one another with absolutely nothing to anchor it to any sort of narrative restraint, Joyce just lets his subconscious go on overdrive and it informs the themes perfectly and ughhhh it's just the best fucking thing ever. So much of this is so transgressively impactful that if you told me this was written in like 2010 I would honestly believe you. The whole novel is obviously forward thinking but I think this chapter in particular is incredibly ahead of its time. Definitely my favorite in the novel.
Episode 17 "Ithaca": A beautiful chapter that's almost inexplicable in it's brilliance; an extremely academic, precise and "cold" omniscient narrative voice watches over Bloom and Stephen's brief time together in a series of ask-and-response passages, immensely detailing the utter minutiae of both characters and dissecting them thoroughly in a way even their inner monologues could not. This is the novel at the height of it's core duality, the peak of it's cosmic scope as well as it's incredibly ordinary one - the balance is awe inspiring and the prose is utterly superlative. Maybe the peak of the book's formal accomplishments, which is saying a lot.
Chapter 18 "Penelope": We finally get a centering of the feminine perspective in this spellbinding capstone, where we finally get a look into Molly's brain as she's half asleep next to a passed out Bloom. Molly's brambly monologue is completely unfiltered and unbroken except for a few indentations, making her voice the ultimate extent of the novel's stream of consciousness techniques, and her rant itself is beautiful, heartbreaking and funny all at once; there's a really deliberate aspect of letting a woman who has til now only been seen through the eyes of men get the last word here, and in these forty some odd pages Molly encapsulates the enormity and beautiful complexity of the human experience and our emotions perhaps even more potently than Bloom and Stephen. The last page is just one of those things that has to be read to believe its absolute perfection; it's an ending that makes all the past 680+ pages of difficulty and struggle extremely worth it and the gorgeous emotional pay off is simply unmatched. Flawless. I'm going to be thinking about this capstone for a very long time.
"His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence."
And for as much as I devalue my own ability to understand and compartmentalize this entire thing vs. feel it [and I’m always much better at the latter, not just with this kind of book], I have to be nice and give myself some credit here. I first opened “Ulysses” at a library when I had just finished high school about half a decade ago now, and got pretty much immediately filtered by “Telemachus”, thinking “there’s no way I can finish this thing in two weeks”. I was just getting back into books then, or trying to, which is sort of like trying to get seriously into music by jumping straight into Stravinsky or something. Ever since then, “Ulysses” has been on my personal Mount Rushmore of books to conquer in my lifetime, a sort of ominous distant threat like the opening boss of a game that you’re supposed to die to that you can finally face again halfway through with better equipment and stats. But while I didn’t “conquer” this upon finishing it, obviously, it’s still an experience I feel accomplished for, and one that’s even more exciting because I know this book is now forever waiting for me to return to it as many times as both of us want, and that’s a feeling that keeps me so invested in “difficult” works like this.
That brings me to the elephant in the room - “Ulysses” is as difficult as people say it is, without a doubt. It’s probably the hardest book I’ve read front to back, significantly tougher than “Gravity’s Rainbow”, which I’d put on a similar wavelength of erudition and abstraction, but where the difficulty of Pynchon’s masterpiece lies in his labyrinthine composition, the difficulty of Joyce’s lies in the fragmentation employed here. That’s not to say “Ulysses” isn’t vast in its scope - in some ways it’s even more wide-ranging than “Rainbow” - but it’s a different kind of massive, less of a maze to be traversed and more of a collection of separate-but-equal moving parts zipping along at varyingly different speeds, and Joyce just trusts that you’re going to have to keep up with it all. Joyce uses style as the pillars that uphold all these moving parts - the book explodes in a phantasmagoria of different styles, pastiches and compositional frameworks, to the point where you will never know what to expect being hit with on any given page, especially in episode nine and beyond. This makes “Ulysses” feel distinctly chaotic in its extensive reach, and it really does feel urban - the way Dublin is portrayed feels almost symphonic, a starburst of sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feelings and just everything in an overwhelming expanse, and it’s felt even when we’re looking deep into Bloom and Stephen’s brains.
So, yeah, it’s not an easy read. And - I’m not going to say it’s fun, necessarily, because not all of it is, and there are certainly some moments that don’t stimulate my brain faculties as much as others [and those moments are inevitable, as the story really is mundane at its core] - but it is enjoyable and funny the whole way through, and Joyce’s playfulness and confidence not only in the unprecedented structuring of the novel but also in his ability to depict the chaos of thoughts that run through our heads daily, it all adds up to a book where there’s never a dull moment if you can just read between the lines and place yourself on the wavelength of what J.J. is doing here. The near infinity of Stuff contained here means that there’s something different for literally anyone to hold on to, and furthermore Bloom, Stephen and Molly are just wonderfully lovable, distinct characters whose existences are probably the closest to living, breathing people you could conceivably get.
Vit’s review said it so much better in a much less convoluted fashion than my ramblings but it’s just so interesting how this book really elevates an average day in an average life to an Epic scale by just showing every angle such a quotidian thing could be approached, while also lowering the concept of the Mythic Epic to a much more human and relatable standard, essentially demystifying the latter while inundating the former with cosmic magic. And that’s a big thing I got out of this novel in general - a recontextualization of narratives we’ve taken for granted, be it that of both Story [such as Homer’s Odyssey] or Life [the totally run-of-the-mill day of a working class Jew in Ireland in 1904]. Lives aren’t stories, but stories also inform our lives, and all stories, even the most fantastical and grandiose, are informed by our lives. James Joyce was, I’m not going to say he was totally average because of his genius and life trajectory, but he was a person, he had all the fears, hopes, anxieties, and thoughts that anyone else does, and here he is writing a story of this immensity and universality - to a point, this very novel almost feels like a statement that anyone with the wherewithal could make their own “Ulysses”, because if one can tackle their take on the totality of the human experience then literally anyone else with thoughts could. This is getting on some New Age-y rambling, so I’m just going to move on from this paragraph, but yeah - there’s a really moving Meta Statement that I got out of this, that we’re all from different walks of life but all capable of our own daily Odysseys and every single day is one chapter in our own personal epics, and whose to say we couldn’t ourselves contain this in our own art?
While reading this throughout the past month I couldn’t help but thinking about how this must have felt to read when it came out vs. now, when we have all the historical context and hindsight of its age and its impact on literature. Like, can you imagine just being an average Bloom him/her/theirself reading this a hundred years ago? It was probably totally beyond the scope of anything else being written at the time, it was difficult enough to wrap my mind around even with all the context of literary maximalism, experimentalism and postmodernist excess that our current generation has come to know, so I can’t imagine how much of a mindfuck it must have felt like back when it was first published. And this thing’s DNA really is everywhere - you couldn’t ask me specifically which [I’d have to go through my marginalia and I wrote a LOT], but I noticed tons of stuff here that’s been referenced elsewhere throughout all art mediums since, like there’d just be something and I’d be like “oh hey that’s an album title isn’t it?” So it’s kind of disappointing seeing people say stuff like life is too short to read this book or that the average person shouldn’t read it, because honestly with how vastly this can be applied to both art and our lives and how much of it is informed by its completely non-average Averageness like…I think life’s too short not to read it, and you should read it. If you like art, like at all, you should read this. Or at least attempt it, because even if you won’t understand everything, there’s stuff here that you will undoubtedly get because it is so baked into modern cultural DNA. Joyce wasn’t lying at all when he said he had put enough stuff in here to ensure the novel’s immortality; he’s done so with flying colors, and that it not only still persists, but does so abundantly throughout our culture just means all we can do at this point is give the guy posthumous Ws on all fronts. Thanks for predicting the entirety of modern history James!
That last comment’s a joke, obviously, but only so much honestly. And really, that quote by Joyce I alluded to in the last paragraph, is another thing that makes this novel as immensely interesting to me as it is. There's a profoundly negative approach we tend to take when talking about the process of Creation, especially of art, that we have to suppress our confidence, suppress positivity toward our own efforts, be totally fucking Judgmental and Critical of absolutely everything we make or else we'll never become better, apparently. This is certainly something I struggle with immensely as a writer, too. And while Joyce no doubt probably ran into unbelievable frustration writing this masterwork [how could he not have?], the statement of just making this alone not only implies confidence, but he's outright boastful about it. And why shouldn't he be? This really is a masterpiece, an utterly timeless and universal work, and Joyce knew it, so he has every right to boast. "Our national epic is yet to be written," he winks in episode nine of this novel. Maybe believing in oneself, being confident in one's own Averageness to do something great, create something great, whatever - maybe that's a fucking great thing actually, maybe it's a worthwhile defiance of the capitalist lie we've all been fed that the worse the pain, the more fruitful the result. Joyce certainly knew he could write something great, that the frustration would be worth it, that he was crafting something that would leave a mark on history. And like, sure, most of us will not be at the sheer level of James Joyce but it doesn't fucking matter, we ALL have the capability to do good and create great stuff in our own ways, and the point I'm getting at here is that it's okay to believe in yourself, to have faith in art and yourself to leave an impact, even in the most infinitesimal ways. We are all Bloom and Stephen and Molly and we're all just going through the motions and there's no reason not to be kind to yourself and others because we all make our own marks, no matter how small our lives are. Write your own indulgent epic if you want, because in many ways life is our own indulgent personalized epic as much as it's totally average, and never forget to be kind to yourself. Please. You deserve that, at the very least you do, I promise.
Spoiler
Some non-required reading for J.J. readers below [that is, me-J.J, and James Joyce-J.J.]; since I'm too entrenched in Formal Analysis not to break this down to its constituent parts, I'm going to do a Top 5 Favorite Ulysses Episodes thingy here. The above review gets at why I love the book in its totality but every episode of the book is an entity unto itself, so I'd be remiss if I didn't hone in on some parts I absolutely love. I'd write a blurb for every chapter, but unfortunately Goodreads has a bullshit character limit. Unordered, obviously, because you can't really genuinely rank something like this; it's just the five that left the strongest impressions on me and the ones I can imagine returning the most to on their own terms.Episode 9 "Scylla and Charybdis": This is the first chapter that totally convinced me I was reading a work of brilliance so I couldn't refrain from placing it in my top five. I know practically zilch about Shakespeare but there's just so many layers of total cleverness and insight to this one, as well as just being somehow fun amidst all of Stephen's neurotic academic jargon - the metatextual parallels between Stephen and Joyce being compared with the proposed meta relationship between Shakespeare and Hamlet, the Anne Hathaway pun, Buck's stupid play, the remark of Bloom checking out the statue of Aphrodite's ass, Joyce's aforementioned boasting; the whole thing is just this amazing metafictional wink at the reader completed with absurd dashes of Joycean humor. Smart and ridiculous as hell at the same time and I totally love it.
Episode 12 "Cyclops": Someone told me this is the chapter supposedly most people hate - what?? This is an utterly madcap vortex through like a dozen mind-bending absurdist pastiches of heroic folk myths of yore and an intrusion upon the text by wildly hilarious flights of supernatural fancy, all in service to a narrative that directly interrogates European nationalism and antisemitism, leading to a conclusion in which our boy Bloom has the clearest emotional victory we see him achieve throughout the entire novel. And Joyce is insane and genius enough to make this entire thing work despite how many apparently disparate moving parts it's comprised of. I feel like this one and "Circe" in particular both predicted postmodernism more than any other chapters, so of course I adore it.
Episode 15 "Circe": This is nothing short of one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had with literature all year. Everyone and everything - and I do mean EVERYTHING - in the novel seen beforehand is taken into a literary blender and vomited up in a fucking garish and lewd and hilarious and beautiful and grotesque phantasmagoric nightmare carnival tour of the psychedelic dreamscapes of Bloom and Stephen's absinthe-addled brains as they romp through Dublin's red light district. Absolutely everything is free associative, things morph and shift and blend into one another with absolutely nothing to anchor it to any sort of narrative restraint, Joyce just lets his subconscious go on overdrive and it informs the themes perfectly and ughhhh it's just the best fucking thing ever. So much of this is so transgressively impactful that if you told me this was written in like 2010 I would honestly believe you. The whole novel is obviously forward thinking but I think this chapter in particular is incredibly ahead of its time. Definitely my favorite in the novel.
Episode 17 "Ithaca": A beautiful chapter that's almost inexplicable in it's brilliance; an extremely academic, precise and "cold" omniscient narrative voice watches over Bloom and Stephen's brief time together in a series of ask-and-response passages, immensely detailing the utter minutiae of both characters and dissecting them thoroughly in a way even their inner monologues could not. This is the novel at the height of it's core duality, the peak of it's cosmic scope as well as it's incredibly ordinary one - the balance is awe inspiring and the prose is utterly superlative. Maybe the peak of the book's formal accomplishments, which is saying a lot.
Chapter 18 "Penelope": We finally get a centering of the feminine perspective in this spellbinding capstone, where we finally get a look into Molly's brain as she's half asleep next to a passed out Bloom. Molly's brambly monologue is completely unfiltered and unbroken except for a few indentations, making her voice the ultimate extent of the novel's stream of consciousness techniques, and her rant itself is beautiful, heartbreaking and funny all at once; there's a really deliberate aspect of letting a woman who has til now only been seen through the eyes of men get the last word here, and in these forty some odd pages Molly encapsulates the enormity and beautiful complexity of the human experience and our emotions perhaps even more potently than Bloom and Stephen. The last page is just one of those things that has to be read to believe its absolute perfection; it's an ending that makes all the past 680+ pages of difficulty and struggle extremely worth it and the gorgeous emotional pay off is simply unmatched. Flawless. I'm going to be thinking about this capstone for a very long time.
"His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence."