“Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming along, passing on.”—James Joyce, Ulysses

  If you’ve been here for any length of time you might be wondering what became of my fulminations on Joyce’s monumental, and what I’ve repeatedly called ‘monumentally misunderstood’ classic Ulysses, published by the way in 1922. 

  Well, I’ve been deliberately steering clear of it. However, the pressure has been building so I figure I might as well get this out of the way. 

  In the book that line: “Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too…” is part of the daytime musings of Leopold Bloom, one of a trio of main characters we follow through a typical June day in 1904 Dublin, Ireland. Academics, who have mined the material of Joyce for comfortably successful careers for a century have always considered Bloom a bumbling, ineffectual and cuckolded modern day ‘everyman’ avatar of Homer’s Odysseus, hence the Roman equivalent title, Ulysses. 

  No, I’m not going deeply into the who’s and what’s of Joyce and Ulysses. No one seems to care and I am not sure it really matters anymore; but I do want to point out one thing no academic in a hundred years has ever quite realized. 

  Recently, having ran into two men reading Hermann Hesse’s cult classic Siddhartha on my wanderings I thought I would give it another go and ended up reading it twice in succession. 

  In Hesse’s simply written masterpiece Siddhartha is on an experiential quest, which even takes him past a chat with Gautama Buddha, towards awakening and enlightenment. For that reason generations of young people have embraced the beauty and simplicity of Siddhartha ever since its publication in… 1922. 

  Here, after a lifetime’s journey, Siddhartha is experiencing awakening while listening to the river he has become a ferryman on in order to help others across:

  “Siddhartha listened…. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices—the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world.”—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

  What the dull plodding overly-literal academic crowd of the last hundred years has failed to grasp, unsurprisingly, is that Leopold Bloom is bumbling and ineffectual precisely because he has attained the enlightenment of Siddhartha! Both have awakened to the Flow of Life! 

  And what’s more in meeting Leopold Bloom Joyce’s other main character, his very own alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, will experience his own awakening to the sacred Flow of Life. 

  And not only that, but the book James Joyce/Stephen Dedalus will then go on to write, Finnegans Wake, will be written in the very near unintelligible language of Flow! 

  And Hesse? He would cap a long career highlighted with a Nobel Prize for literature with his The Glass Bead Game, a metaphorical play on what else but the Flow of Life. 

  As the West subsides from world dominance and hegemony will a profound scientifically backed understanding of the underpinnings of the Flow of Life be our great gift to the heritage of humankind? 

  I believe so…

  Because Life is ALL there is….