James Joyce's Trieste

"And trieste ah trieste ate I my liver" -- Finnegan's Wake

"The average traveler would not make a point of staying long in Trieste" -- Cook's Handbook

The idea was born underground, one February morning in the Paris Metro. Weaving through tunnels the color of fluorescent light, we halted, stumbling over ourselves, before a yellowing tourism poster that was strangely symbolic amongst perfume advertisements and scrawled graffiti: a photograph of a violent fairy-tale, a photograph of a castle white and turreted, balanced upon a jagged cliff and reaching sharply towards the limits of a fierce, dark body of water, at the depths of which was inscribed once simple and mysterious word: Trieste.

We knew the word. We stopped short not for the incongruous beauty of a faded poster, but for the faded beauty of a fabled city: James Joyce's Trieste, where he wrote most of Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and much of Ulysses. Still I could see the stark outline of his words in my mind, still I could remember reading them for the first time in the white stillness of my bedroom, bound for Oxford the very next day, eyes squeezed tight in desperate gratitude, and yes, ecstasy, and above all, physical relief that as it turned out, reading is like this:

...and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And then, nearly inseparable, simply, and in italics:

Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-2

So that the word Trieste, gently italicized and right on the tail of Molly's final affirmation, becomes a part of the text: an unknown place and an unknown noise, hissed sound silently, meditatively, a word that rests dream-like on the floor of one's mind, giving space, pause, to the nothingness that floods before thought: somewhere that must be somewhere in this world, but perhaps not as one has known it.

"Yes. Trieste", I said, and we went.

It was not our first literary pilgrimage, or even our first Joycean pilgrimage. If you ask Jon why he decided to spend his junior year abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, he will first joke about his trouble with foreign languages, and next tell you about the excellent English department.