Buried
by Greta Schuler

“Most beautiful paragraph ever written.”

“Really? I have it right here.”

I rolled towards my nightstand and snatched the used copy of The Dubliners with the price “$1.00” etched in pencil on the cover. The seagreen-bound book had bounced in my bag on my first flight to college and had slept by my bed ever since, waiting for me to finish whatever tome my professors assigned.

“It’s the very last paragraph of the very last story,” he said. “I don’t think it’s that great. I prefer nonfiction, but a teacher told me it was the best.”

He kissed my shoulder as I shrugged, hurrying through the worn pages to find the mythic passage. The reading lamp burned my red sheets into glowing flames while the shock of stark letters scorched my sleepy eyes. I doubted any one paragraph could claim the crown as king. I found the contender left alone on the last page, cleverly disguised as any other piece of writing. Remnants of sleep and alcohol glazed my eyes for the first sentence: “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.” I tried to picture the person turning, a man. The calm of the early, dark morning molded with the gentle words: “He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.” He was setting out for his journey westward. I had carried this book west with me, a student, the first in my family to venture from Missouri to California.

I did not even know what I was reading for the next few lines; this lotus lulled me to a lazy state where I felt the pleasure of the words without understanding them. Then a name: “It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.” The name, him, I tried to connect them, brothers, friends? The name woke me and my warm sheets turned cold as I felt the snow on “the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.” I knew I would read this paragraph over and over.

Three months later on Christmas night, I reached the paragraph again, this time after reading every word that came before it. My little sister breathed heavily by my side and the bird clock ticked and chirped on the wall, but they were small whispers in the greater hush. Winter nights in rural Missouri freeze into the silent stillness of dark snow on dead trees. Each curve of each letter seemed to flow gently into the next as if the words were written instead of typed. I sank into the handmade quilt and tried to imitate my sister’s deathlike stillness. This last paragraph belonged only to the soft quiet of covers and pillows on a sunless morning.

I left my sea-green Dubliners on a newly-built bookshelf in St. Louis when I returned to California. I read Paradise Lost in the airport, causing multiple people to comment, disbelieving it was “for fun.” Standing in the college bookstore, I felt strange holding an untouched copy of The Dubliners, the edition I needed for my Joyce class. The pages were crisp and white with a painting on the cover full of reds and yellows and blues. I had to underline phrases and star passages before I could comfortably hold the book. The book, the words, the sounds, my marks, my name, Gretta’s name, my old copy, they all seemed mysteriously connected. During my Joyce class, I felt everyone’s comments on the story almost irreverent, its sanctity being out of the realm of class discussion. Then Professor Jaurretche said that the final paragraph, by spreading out all over Ireland, reached beyond the book and all over the world.

Our study of The Dubliners flowed naturally into our study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as if Joyce’s writing was simply living like us, changing with time yet still surviving intact. Though Dubliners had my name, Portrait had my heart. The young artist, Stephen lived constantly the tingle I felt in bed with his thoughts. He began untwisting the inscrutable links between art, life, imagination, beauty, all those words that do not really contain but breathe out ideas. From Stephen I learned that art is life.

Walking along the beach, Stephen sees the scenery as lines of poetry and then a girl as a bird. Just as the light snow fell faintly and faintly fell, this girl’s “bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft.” Her image, its reality and his interpretation of it, ignite his soul: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” The simple scene takes place in a moment on the shore, but its depth continues through millions of minds reading millions of copies of the same words printed millions of times.

The words and sounds from these works have been following me. My flipflops slap pick pack pock puck against my heels as I scurry from the library to my Joyce class. Pick pack drops drip from glazed leaves to pock puck the cement. Reverently I cradle Ulysses in my arms. Each page seems more like a painting than a passage. The words tumble off the page as I fall into the letters. My memories seem to mingle with Stephen’s; the pick pack pock of cricket bats become the pack pock puck of field hockey sticks from high school practice. Each small thing around me is a word and infused with meaning and an image packed with color. The intimacy with the art of the world intensifies as other worries wither.

Walking to yoga class, I tread behind a beautiful girl remembering how I had tossed my hair the same way walking back to my room from his car. Two nights before I felt his hand caressing the small of my back as a third party’s voice commented, “Oh hey, I saw your girlfriend over there.” He barely had time for a hurried “bye” as I drowned my eyes in my drink, staring at the bottom of my winedark, plastic cup. The tang of the tequila sunrise and the vibrations jolting through my high heels cut an edge on the melancholy. The crowd blurred as the dark coated faces like masks. The flip of her dark tresses pulled that night into the bright morning. I felt not hurt seeing her leave his large black car, as I had left it a couple of weeks before. My interest was the recreated image and the power it had to invoke the dark party. I escaped from bitterness into the sweet sadness of a perfectly constructed scene, where I watched her as the reader, connected because I had lived the same role.

The first time I read the best paragraph ever written I felt someone’s eyes behind me, judging it. Like him, I wasn’t sure it was worthy of its crown, until I reached the end. Still soaked in the softness of the rhythm, I had to read the sentence again: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I breathed in deeply trying to suck in the words from the page. I held the book, my own little secret in the sanctuary of pillows and soft jersey sheets. The binding was falling apart and the words looked like any other words of an old used book, the perfect disguise.

“See, I told you it isn’t all that great.” He smugly snuggled back into the intimacy of my bed. I inched towards the nightstand where my weak hand had gently placed the book. Gretta was sleeping there, lost in a dead world; Gabriel was looking to a world not yet lived. The sheets were winedark without the lamp. His face was behind me and his words muffled as they trailed off, but Joyce’s words settled on my ear and covered me like my winedark sheet, faintly falling, falling faintly on my still body and his sleeping one.

Greta Schuler is a rising junior at Claremont McKenna College majoring in Literature from St. Louis, Missouri.  She is working the summer of 2005 at the International Institute in St. Louis with a fellowship from CMC and will write biographies of twelve immigrant women in St. Louis.