From the Finnegans Wake · Book 1 thread on Swerve of Shore, by Brandon Nicklaus.
We are using the 1999 Penguin Classics edition of Finnegans Wake, with an introduction by John Bishop.
Now that we’ve glimpsed the world’s history in motion—rising, clashing, and unraveling—we arrive at a thunderword. A single, roaring word that marks the fall. The fall of man? Wall Street? The Tower of Babel? The collapse of civilizations, past, present, and future? Yes. All of it.
Joyce doesn’t just hint at a fall—he detonates it. This thunderclap is the breaking point, the cosmic tripwire in Finnegans Wake’s swirling cycle. A seismic shift in the dream, a rupture in the eternal loop. We’ve just stepped out of history’s grand panorama—so what comes next in our adventure?
Read the full piece at Swerve of Shore
Opening paragraphs quoted from swerveofshore.com and reproduced with the author's permission. This site is a layout rebuild on the zer0-mistakes theme — the full essay lives on the original.