EPIPHANY

Everyone has sudden flashes of perception and insight. Writers have a name for them - epiphanies

Epiphany is Twelfth Night – the 6^th 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 10 record appearances of gods and goddesses. Traditionally the word has kept this specific religious association, but in our century it has been secularized to refer to other, non-divine forms of revelation.

JOYCE 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 startle which seemed to have hightened 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 Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after 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 Eccles St., 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 passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely. This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”(Chapter 25)