At some point in high school, a friend demanded that I read James Joyce‘s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I promptly bought a copy, put it on my bookshelf, and ignored it for a quarter of a century. Finally got around to reading it.
Being a Künstlerroman, there are long passages (often in dialogue) where Joyce, as the thinly-veiled protagonist Stephen Dedalus, pontificates on a great number of topics. Some of these topics, like Irish politics of the 1920s or Catholic theology, left me cold. However, others did draw my attention.
On his calling:
“To live, to err, to fall, to triump, to recreate life out of life!”
On himself:
“—This race and this country and this life produce me—he said.—I shall express myself as I am.—”
On whether he was happier back when he had wholeheartedly believed in Catholicism:
“—Often happy—Stephen said—and often unhappy. I was someone else then.—”
On the difference between “improper art” and good art:
“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; something urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
On the dramatic form:
“The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied around each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.”
On the most desirable way for him to live:
“To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”
Again, on creating art out of life:
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”