The philosophical ponderings of a wandering young mind. One that struggles to see the path ahead. The future. Clinging for dear life to the ancient notion that ideas originate from our sensory experience. With epiphany and understanding only arising through the clarity of sight.

But what does one notice when this ability is taken away?

The spiritual idea that the vastness of the universe exists only through our conscious perception of it in each and every moment? Or the harsh realisation that everything seems to live on just fine without our experience of it all?

This brief poetic line of existential thinking that Stephen Dedalus adopts on his midday walk along Sandymount Strand was my first way into the idea of Ulysses.

It had all seemed so incoherent to me at first. The stream of consciousness style writing left me bewildered in a sea of Latin words I did not understand. But it was this performance of Proteus by Maurice Roëves in Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation of Ulysses that allowed me to absorb the book in a different mode, with fresh appreciation.

I’d been approaching the text like it was the same as any other book, looking for clues to a plot or story, and failing to find many. But I recognised this line of thinking when I first heard it spoken. The wild esoteric tangents a human mind often takes when one walks alone. The performance. The human intonation. Its questioning tone. Its curious cadence. They allowed me to download a new voice into my mind with which to read the rest of the text. A practice that I have found quite helpful since, using it to enjoy and decipher other poetic pieces of prose.