"I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul."

• James Joyce, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (27 April 1907)

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New York Sarah Lawrence College Professor Joseph Campbell referenced James Joyce throughout his lifetime, including the summer of 1987 at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch California interviewers with Bill Moyers, when Campbell was age 83: "The big moment in the medieval myth is the awakening of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion. That is the whole problem of the Grail stories, compassion for the wounded king. And out of that you also get the notion that Abelard offered as an explanation of the crucifixion: that the Son of God came down into this world to be crucified to awaken our hearts to compassion, and thus to turn our minds from the gross concerns of raw life in the world to the specifically human values of self-giving in shared suffering. In that sense the wounded king, the maimed king of the Grail legend, is a counterpart of the Christ. He is there to evoke compassion and thus bring a dead wasteland to life. There is a mystical notion there of the spiritual function of suffering in this world. The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion. This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses—the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way."

Wake up, kids... We got the dreamers disease

"June 20, 2016 — It is everyone's dream, the dream of all the living and the dead. Many puzzling features become clear if this is accepted."

https://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2016/06/who-is-dreaming-finnegans-wake.html

"James Stephen Atherton (1910–85) was an English scholar, from Wigan, whose 1959 work, The Books at the Wake, is my favourite of all the critical works on Finnegans Wake. He's also the subject of Dottir of her Father's Eyes, the graphic memoir by his daughter, Mary Talbot, illustrated by Bryan Talbot."

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"As with hit tunes and hit pictures and hit entertainments, fashion rushes in to fill the vacuum in our senses created by technological displacements. Perhaps that is why it seems to be the expression of such a colossal preference while it lasts. James Joyce gives it a key role in Finnegans Wake in his section on the Prankquean. The Prankquean is the very expression of war and aggression. In her life, clothing is weaponry: "I'm the queen of the castle and you're the dirty rascal." In the very opening line of Finnegans Wake — "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..."— Joyce thus indicates the reversal of nature that has taken place since the fall of man. It is not the world of Adam and Eve, but one in which there is priority of Eve over Adam. Clothing as weaponry had become a primary social factor. Clothing is anti-environmental, but it also creates a new environment. It is also anti- the elements and anti-enemies and anti- competitors and anti-boredom." - Page 21, 1968 "War and Peace in the Global Village", Marshall McLuhan