EPIPHANY

Everyone has sudden flashes of perception and inside writers have a name of them - Epiphanies.

Epiphany  is twelfth night - the sixth of January - when Christ was visited by the three Wise men, and his divinity was revealed to the world. It derives from a Greek word, epiphainein, meaning "to manifest" and in pre-Christian times it was used to record appearance of God and Goddess. Traditionally the world has kept this specific religious association, but in our century it has been secularized to refer to other, non-diving forms of revelation.

JOYCE'S SECULAR EPIPHANY

The principal writer to extend the meaning of the word as a secular term was James Joyce, who was interested in sudden, dramatic and startling moments which seemed to have heightened significance and to be surrounded with a kind of magical aura. The well known reference is in Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus is thinking to himself: "remember your Epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world including Alessandria. Someone was to read them thereafter a few thousand years".

The notion of the Joycean Epiphany was first outlined in Stephen Hero ( the early version of A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man), when a casual incident in Ecles Street, Dublin strikes Stephen. A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passes on this quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

Thus triviality made him thik of collecting many such moments together in a book of Epiphanies. But an Epiphany he meant A SUDDEN SPIRITUAL MANIFESTATION WHETHER IN THE VULGARITY OF SPEECH OR OF GESTURE OR IN MEMORABLE PHASE OF THE MIND ITSELF.

"He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these Epiphanies with extreme care, saying that themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments" (chapter 25).