Finnegans Wake - James Joyce [57]
Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyhow?
Erect, beseated, mountback, against a partywall, below freezigrade, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site, atwixt two showers or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a right-down regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?
Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or be-coming out of patience. A good plan used by worried business folk who may not have had many momentums to master Kung’s doctrine of the meang or the propriety codestruces of Carpri-mustimus is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience pos— sessed in their conjoint names by both brothers Bruce with whom are incorporated their Scotch spider and Elberfeld’s Calculating Horses. If after years upon years of delving in ditches dark one tubthumper more than others, Kinihoun or Kahanan, giardarner or mear measenmanonger, has got up for the darnall same pur-pose of reassuring us with all the barbar of the Carrageehouse that our great ascendant was properly speaking three syllables less than his own surname (yes, yes, less!), that the ear of Fionn Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker local jargon for an ace’s patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!) then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return, where-abouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that glorisol which plays touraloup with us in this Aludin’s Cove of our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil?
Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclu-sion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpre— sence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally file:///E|/Books/Top%20100%20Novels%20list/Finnegans%20Wake/complete.html[9/12/2007 12:21:58 PM]
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others. Luckily there is another cant to the questy. Has any fellow, of the dime a dozen type, it might with some profit some dull evening quietly be hinted
—has any usual sort of ornery josser, flat— chested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by syncopation in the elucidation of complications, of his greatest Fung Yang dynasdescendanced, only another the son of, in fact, ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it ex-hibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passion— pallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck it— self under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to