 Greetings, howdy partners. Welcome back. So here, ladies, we are going to be reading from the most difficult book in the world. It is called Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. Oh, keep in mind that this is controlled insanity, but not insanity, but controlled. And this is not only the hardest book, but probably the best book. You should get more motivated into this book. I highly recommend listening to Terrence McKenna on Finnegan's Wake, the whole talk. He talks for over an hour about it. It's really re-sparked my interest after I'd gone to it to read and lost interest in it entirely. And that's easy to happen. It's easy to happen just like, no, it's not your thing, you know, you look at it, you try to give it a shot. But it's because it's not like any other novel. I did a whole talk on it. So go back and look at my video. I'll try to post it. I just want to read right now from this book, Finnegan's Wake. And not from the beginning could easily do it. Like I was saying, it takes an affinity with the rhythm. When I first came to it, I didn't realize that the true issue with most readers is figuring out the rhythm, because the rhythm is also a part of decoding. And now I'm not claiming I've figured it out. I'm just as deluded as any other reader. This is the most Talmudic book in as that we require other people to have read it. And we need to listen to what other people have said about it too, most importantly, to help navigate it. I mean, that's the only way we're going to navigate this book. But we can also help inspire each other with it, not to go out and read the whole thing, because it's just too difficult for that. It really is. It's too difficult for of a book. And it's huge. It's a huge book. And it's brilliant. It feels magnificent, at least this publishing of it, which is probably, I think, the original, the originally intended publishing. And it's just, it's so lovely to to finger through these pages in this book. Oh, just, it's great. But nonetheless, you've got to, we've got to get inspired by it from other people. But here's the thing. If you can just find one paragraph, right, that flows for you, you just, the rhythm makes sense. And then the humor will come alive. And then there will be some sort of, you know, maybe a secret meaning to you about that fits into what you know overall about the book. So whether, however limited that is, it's like all of those explanations are actually living parts of Finnegan's Wake. So I'm going to read from the second page. There's so many great places to start. I mean, this book, you could actually call every page through the book is potentially a first page. Now, of course, there's some ambiguities with that, you can sort of sift through it yourself. But essentially, the beginning of the book can sort of start wherever, wherever you want. And that's a little bit baffling, you know, for most readers, because it's a fractal book. Nonetheless, it's like, it's a typographical book too. It's something you've just got to read. You can't listen to other people reading it, only very limited amounts of the paragraphs would that work for. Like just to hear people reading through Finnegan's Wake is just as tedious as doing that yourself. That's not the way we approach a book like this in our own interest, if that's what we have in mind. Because otherwise, this book will just consume you and you'll be left high and dry. Because Joyce was just more intelligent than any one of us, truly, truly. I think historically that's recognized now in the literary circles. Joyce was smarter than any one of us. And he was smarter than any team, any teams that we can put together. Afraid so, he is. He was one of those rare, once in a millennium kind of intellects. That's what it seems. And so it comes out in this book. So let's see. Because there are, like I'm saying, it's a, it's a typographical thing. It is meant to be read aloud also. But you know, like there, you've got to cheat, there are certain parts of the typography, like for instance, the thunderclaps. There are like four or five times in the book where a primordial thunderclap is, is illiterated, is actually written out in all, like usually with 50 to 100 characters in one word. And I've heard people reading them, and there are actually some people that give whole dissertations upon the thunderclaps, just alone, and say, look, look how actually they make sense. It's not just a random accruement of words, a cruel of words. It's not, it's not just a random accretion of letters and syllables mixed up to sound like a thunderclap. It's nothing like, it's a lot more than that. I mean, it is that too. But on the other hand, from a perspective of reading, I mean, it's like, yeah, you can study it. But when you're reading it, you don't have to, like, iterate every single vowel and consonant perfectly as he wrote it. You can just say, like, that's my opinion of it. Like, you can just sort of imitate a thunderclap in your own way. And, and you would be more true to Finnegan's weight to do that than you would to try and read out everyone like a lot of people do. So it's one of those books that's confusing. A lot of the stuff that's out there about it only confuses it more because there's Irish guys that are just reading from it. And that doesn't do do a lot of good just from someone to read it to you. Like I'm saying, you could read it yourself, someone reads it to you. No, we need to be able to read what's going to inspire people. That's what I'm about to read to you, something that's, I find truly inspiring. It might be a little bit too obtuse intense for most of the viewers, but that's fine. I mean, most of the viewers have already been combed out by this introduction and only the hardcore literati who are there. Yeah, I want to hear this. I want, I'm waiting for the inspiration that you're going to share in this. Well, I'm going to bring it to you. But I just, like I'm like I'm saying, Finnegan's weight is like there's so much to say. It's a typographical wilderness. It's a jungle, but everything makes sense. I mean, it's an organic jungle and it's built upon many languages. Most of them are English, but there are so many other languages interfused within the English and so many double and triple entendres that, or however you pronounce that, there are so many that you just, one person can't catch them all. So it's not a book just for one person or for individuals to sit down and enjoy over the summer or over the week. Their week vacation or something to plow through the book and then conquer it. You've finished it, right? There's no one out there who can say, oh yeah, I've finished Finnegan's weight. I don't think there is. It's not a book that you can finish. There's no end to it. There really is no end to it. It's not a book that can be finished. So a book like that is really difficult to start. And this attests to the genius of Jane's joys because no one else could write a book like this. No one else could. Who could possibly write a book like this? People have tried to copy Joyce since then, like the guy who wrote, what was his name? He wrote Sexus, right? And he wrote the Oranges, didn't he? I think he also wrote the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch or had a different title with that in it. Man, name slit my mind, right? The American writer, he tried to write some sort of like pioneering cutting-edge novels, but nobody ever, you just, you don't, you pale. Everybody pales next to Joyce. Like you don't even try. That's what I say. Don't even try, right? Why write? Why keep writing when it's all there? It's all in Finnegan's wake. All we have to do is get the book and show a little dedication and interest and then, and then we realize, I mean, it's like there's really no, I mean, this is the end, this is, he did it. He did it in fiction. Now all we have to do in fiction is stop printing and writing new fiction. We just have to go back and read it. And this is a mystery novel too. Forget Stephen King. Stephen King is the most crass, petulant writer in the world. He doesn't have a creative bone in his body. He's a ideological thief. So, I mean, something like that, whereas this is all originality, all like in every possible way, there's no way to summarize Finnegan's wake because you can't finish it. It's a book you can't finish, so how can you possibly give it a summary? And nonetheless, it really helps to the people who've attempted to do so for us. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, people. Namely, Joseph Campbell. He did, he wrote personally, I think his best work, usually a lot of great thinkers, their best work is their first work. Like Nietzsche, his best work was his first work, right? The end of college, he wrote these couple essays, The Birth of Tragedy. Definitely. His most lucid and best thinking after that, he was just sort of playing the role, the puppet philosopher, right? He was just sort of the stuffed animal philosopher that he marketed himself as, right? It was just a marketing ploy after that. Looks like to me. But from the beginning, I mean, that was the essence of what Nietzsche achieved. And then so we look at Joseph Campbell, no doubt. I mean, it's like he wrote so much about mythology, and it's like, I can't even penetrate that. I can't say that I've been able to finish those books, and I can talk about them with any clarity at all. But nonetheless, I think his best book was about Finnegan's Wake, the skeleton key to Finnegan's Wake. That's another good one to read. That helps you kind of summarize. It really sort of draws a circle. It makes it seem like it's not an infinite book in every way, on every page, in every sentence, and oftentimes in almost every word, there's an infinite number of iterations and interpretations that can go on. And so the key, Terrence McKenna hit on it. The key of it is the rhythm, sort of to appreciating it. We've got to imbibe the rhythm of these paragraphs. And that will come after reading the skeleton key and knowing sort of what it's about. And then we realize that each, the rhythms are actually more or less character than we also have to keep an open mind to know that those characters, each character in the book is not frozen in time, but they're also like, by being frozen in one place in one time in Dublin, it's a book specifically about Dublin. It's a night dream. It's a book basically about the dream, the dreams, the night while the two people are sleeping in bed. It's a wife and a husband. And the husband is a tavern keeper from Denmark who's migrated to live and start a tavern in Ireland. And so that's basically, but this is his dream and he's sleeping next to his wife. They have ridiculous names. So I don't even want to break it for you. Just read, just check out the skeleton key or well, check out Terence McKenna first because that will inspire you to read the skeleton key. Otherwise, it's going to be hard. So like I said, we take little baby steps toward this book and then it opens up to be extremely rewarding, extremely rewarding. And with that, I'd like to reward you with just a few minutes of reading of this book, but I think it really helps to have that context beforehand. It helps me to give it. And I think it's going to help the appreciation of it, even if it's just a few minutes. And that's also going to help you to have not to have skipped the head and then have started in the middle that you want to hear even though I'm beginning basically in the middle of the book. It's sort of at the beginning. It's just basically a page, a page in. And it's the first page and the first paragraph, everything's beautiful. I'm not saying skip it. I'm just saying, well, I mean, this, you can just as well start almost anywhere in the book, like, you know, page 16. But then again, you can start at the end. You really can. You can start because I guess you don't have to read it linearly. And yet that's how we read, right? We read linearly. So like he made a real paradoxical mystery in this book. That's the thing. So I think it's going to do you well to hear me from the beginning of right when I start, which is going to be in about five or 10 seconds. So I'll begin in the paragraph of this book. Oh, it's after one of the first thunder claps, which comes at in the third paragraph. So like I was saying about the reiteration, like, when we get the, when we get the rhythm, we're not going to actually try to trip ourselves up and catching all the different syllables that he wrote for a thunderclap. We're going to take the role of a storyteller and just approximate the sound of a thunderclap, which is really the most important thing of it. And only the reiteration of it, which ruins the rhythm and ruins the beauty. It's for the scholars to go in and the archaeologists to go in with a nut pick and toothbrush. As Terence McKenna like to say about the book, you've got to go in with nut pick and toothbrush and scrape away and scrape away and try to begin to reveal the beauty of this wondrous book. Here we go. By Ignester Finnegan of the stuttering hand, Freeman's Maurer lived in the broadest way imaginable in his rushlet too far back for messages before Joshua and judges had given us numbers or Helvidekus committed deuteronomy. One yeasty day, he sternly struck his, his tit in a tub for to watch the future of his fates, but ere he swiftly stuck it out again by the might of Moses. The very water was evaporated and all the guineases had met their exodus. So that ought to show you what a penchant just chap he was. Undering mighty odd years this man of hod cement and edifices in toppers' thorp piled buildung a supra buildung upon the banks for the livers by the so-and-so. He idle little pfeifee, Annie ugged the little crater. Wither hair in hawns, tuck up your part in her. After a while, bulbulous mither head with goodly trowel in grasp and ivory-oiled overalls, which he particularly fancied like Harun Shildirik, Aegeberth. He would calculate by multiple cobbles the altitude and multitude until he seesaw by neat light of the liquor where twin twizborn, his round head staple of other days, to rise in undress masonry, up-standard joy-cratit. A wall-worth of a sky-er-scrape of most eiffel, hoyeth in powerly, aerogenating from next to nothing and celescalating the hymnals and all higher architect tipped up flopically with a burning bush a-pob off its bobbletop and with lirenzo-toolers clittering up and tumble the buckets clossering down. Of the first was he to bear arms and a name, Wassily Boosterloaf of Reisingborg, whose crust of hurl-dry invert with ancillars, troublant, urgent, a hedge-oak pursuant, horrid hornyd, his scotch-emfecid with archers strung, helio of the second. Hooch is for husbandmen handling his hoe. Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! Mr. Finn, you're going to be Mr. Finn again! Come day mornin', oh, you're vine! Sunday's Eve and ah, you're vinegar! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Mr. Finn, you're going to be fine again!