Sitting in a pleasant Calgary coffee shop called Gravity the other day I was working on what will eventually become my next YouTube video. The tentative title at this point being Zen, Buddhism, and the Omphalos Cafe’s Four Noble Truths.

The thing is, while searching through a collection of quotes I’ve gathered together through twenty-five odd years of reading and note taking I came upon a fantastic little glean from Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Damn, I said to myself, that belongs at the beginning of my LAST video, James Joyce’s Ulysses: Awakening to the Wonder.

Putting Awakening to the Wonder together I had used a quote of Johan Peter Eckermann’s, from the forward to his Conversations With Goethe. It went:

“The advantage which we derive from studying the works of a great author may be of different kinds; but the chief benefit probably consists in this, that we become more clearly conscious, not only of our own internal nature, but also of the varied world without us.”

The whole idea of the video, and indeed the three videos I put together on the subject, was that we have collectively totally misunderstood Ulysses and the writings of James Joyce in general, and that they have so much more to reveal to us today, so much more about who we are and where we’ve come from, where we’re at, and where we’re going into the future.

Anyway, home I went to make the change.