epiphany

epiphany, in literature, a sudden revelation of an underlying truth about a person or situation. Taken from the Greek epiphaneia, the manifestation by the gods of their divinities to mortal eyes, the term was first applied to literature by James Joyce, who called his early experimentations with short prose passages “epiphanies”. Such moments of insight form the core of Joyce’s short stories, published in Dubliners (1914)

Epiphany 1a

I’ve climbed… Need to catch my breath… Now I can rise my head…Around me sheer peaks. Rocky precipices, so mighty that it seems they collapse and fall on me. The crags are so sharp – like the teeth of enormously big beast. The tops are bare, no plants would manage to survive so high, much much lower some darker stains – probably moss; and something grey : screes? No, it must be dirty snow remaining still in the shadowy places, even though it’s the middle of the summer. At the bottom of the mountains – a lake, gleaming in the sunrays, surrounded by a forest. I can smell barely perceptible damp, the air becomes cooler. I feel like I were in the bottom of mountainous bowl. And I am so small - little stone between the rocks. Who was the Potter who made that bowl so delightfully?

I can hear someone whispering to my ear: ‘come in, come closer’…A plop of the waves sounds so encouraging and the colours of the water look so tempting: bright and clear tourquoise close to the shore, then more intensive and profound green until a sombre navy blue of the deepest point. Like a warm, Southern sea. I close my eyes and imagine I’m submerging into the blue, very slowly, the cold is not that sharp as I though it is, deeper and deeper...’come closer, come closer’… I wouldn’t even notice when it would absorb me, seduced by the blue…I open my eyes… no sound, but forest’s hum…