In the Dark<p><strong>Bloomsday 2025</strong></p><p></p><p>So it’s 16th June, a very special day in Ireland – especially Dublin – because 16th June 1904 is the date on which the story takes place of <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Ulysses</a></em> by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">James Joyce</a>. <a href="http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Bloomsday</a> – named after the character Leopold Bloom – is an annual celebration not only of all things Joycean but also of Ireland’s wider cultural and literary heritage.</p><p>If you haven’t read <em>Ulysses</em> yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It’s a long read, that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve read it three times now, once as a teenager, once in my thirties, and again last year when I’d reached sixty.</p><p>Anyway, here’s an excerpt with an astromomical theme, which seems to me to fit this blog:</p><blockquote><p>With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?</p><p>Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.</p></blockquote><p>I’ll also mention that, starting at 8am on RTÉ Radio 1 Extra (but also available at other times on the RTÉ player), you <a href="http://rte.ie/dramaonone" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">can listen to the classic radio broadcast of Ulysses from 1982</a>.</p><p><a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://telescoper.blog/tag/bloomsday/" target="_blank">#Bloomsday</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://telescoper.blog/tag/james-joyce/" target="_blank">#JamesJoyce</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://telescoper.blog/tag/leopold-bloom/" target="_blank">#LeopoldBloom</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://telescoper.blog/tag/ulysses/" target="_blank">#Ulysses</a></p>