It's a day of reflection for me. The sun is shining brightly on the newly fallen snow of this past weekend and I've come across a quote from The Writer's Almanac of January 6th. It's for every writer who never ever really quite got what James Joyce and a zillion other writers today mean by the expression; "epiphany."
"Around the time Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word "epiphany." In his early 20s, he drew up little sketches, sort of like "prose poems," in which he illustrated epiphanies. He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of "inadvertent revelations," and said they were "little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal." He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment when 'the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant.' "
Oh and here's another quote, this one from Anais Nin:
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."
