The Son of Coal

“They had a contest in Dun Laoghaire a couple of years ago, putting up a stone in a tree to honor Joyce, in Sandycove, near The Tower, and this is based on the stone and the tree in FW, which is another of the two twins - 

The Stone is Dead and The Tree is Alive. 

But The Hidden Unity is Coal - 

if The Tree is dead long enough, it becomes Coal, which is Stone, 

and so 

There’s the link between The Living and The Dead. 

 Everything is linked. 

So that put up the tree and the stone, and they had a contest for a sentence from Joyce to put on the stone, and people sent in their favourite sentences. And I was not disappointed in my expectation that my choice was not the one they used. My choice was from the letter he wrote to his brother Stanislaus, “What liberation would it be to cast off the political tyranny of England and remain under the intellectual tyranny of Rome?”

In a 95% catholic country, I didn’t think they would put that on the stone, and they did not. What they put on the stone was, “the sea’s ruler, he gazed over the sea...”, I can’t remember the whole sentence. It begins with, “the sea’s ruler”, and it refers to an English character in Ulysses, which lead to an outbreak of fury among some Joyceans - (inaudible) - What was wrong with the committee that they were so ignorant about Ulysses - so idiotic they picked a sentence about an Englishman from a Great Irish novel. They should’ve taken my recommendation.

I: Oh that’s terrible (laughs)!