James Joyce - The Dead

Out of the dark I hear an Irish woman, quizzical, sneering slightly, crying Beannacht libh as she slips laughingly into the night. There is warm light emanating from a dining hall, two women, both old, can hardly hold back tears as a man trembling makes a speech. Daylight is only a few hours away, mirth and confusion as two men bundle an old musky woman up a carriage amidst a flurry of goodbyes, the carriage fades into the cold dark beneath a laden sky. A woman haunted by a pair of eyes out of a night from her childhood. An ache, long dormant, unspooled by a hoarse tenor mustering unwillingly a song of old, and the uncanny likeness of two nights decades adrift, common in epilogues that fail spectacularly to reconcile.

Before long, it snowed.

A few light taps on the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen, and farther westward, upon the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

From The Dead, James Joyce

Almost at random I picked this up and read it through dinner, for the second time. Almost without needing context, James Joyce comes from the front and still surprises when he surrounds you completely in his night.