“He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.”
–James Joyce, from the end of chapter 4, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
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Nothing like becoming and feeling and knowing It. Nothing like a waking dream, a true Moment of Being; here, the Joycean epiphany writ large. Nothing like the great connection with the mysterious Life Force and the rich empowering spirit of the great heart awakened in one’s self, one’s consciousness. The feeling of spreading warmth, spreading awareness of one’s self and the many possibilities. A special magical world created by words. A growing outward, filling the outer world from within. This is the experience of creative inspiration. This is the large liberation and subsuming of the external world funneled through the inner self and creator’s vision, returning unto the outer world, and even, transcendentally, the heavens, to the ideal/ized world where one completes oneself and a cosmic harmony between Nature and self.
No, there is no other feeling or experience like it, open unto Man or the Artist. The freedom of poetic expression, the artificer in process, fully known, realized and experienced.