Finnegans Wake

"What's a wake?

It's when you're not sleeping, isn't it?" 

Joyce knew exactly what he was doing. Finnegans Wake is not a book in the way most books are—it is a dream caught in the act of dreaming, a place where meaning is unstable, language is fluid, and time does not move forward so much as it folds inward on itself. All of history, all of myth, all of language collapses into this one dream-night of the world, where a fall is also a rise, a joke is also a prophecy, and nothing ever really begins or ends.

And so wordsnarl and thoughtknots, babblebroth and blatherwhirl, for here is night's own speakasy, where the whispers of yesternames and tomorrowsounds tumble overunder and neverdone, colliding into punundrum perplexagrams. The language warps itself awake, turns inoutupsidewisewrong, where all is ever and ever is all, and what you thought you read was only the echo of what you were just about to think. History repeats, but not the same, but always the same, but never the same, a myth misremembered, retold, rewordled, worldled, wordled, worled—and by the time you’ve grasped it, it’s slipped through again, laughing back at you, mockloving teasing, wheeling away.

Whisht! and shhhheee allistening now, for riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, and we're way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the...