lovely lit

It seems that whenever life isn't going so well, I find these beautiful bits of language that make me happy to be alive, and make me believe in beauty, in love, in all of it. From James Joyce's Dubliners, The Dead, when the husband, Gabriel, is thinking of a letter that he wrote once to his wife Gretta. He wrote:


Why is is that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?


Swoon. And then, the very end:


It [the snow] was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furley 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.


Beautiful.