Snow was general all over Ireland

Before I started school here in Kentucky, I had never witnessed the snow at night. Light, from sources both natural and artificial, illuminates the flakes, creating millions of glowing stars as they fall to earth, and the ghostly view makes one introspective. Life seems so fragile in those moments. Everything seems to be slipping slowly away, and it's all you can do to capture that beauty in your heart before it's gone forever.

James Joyce's The Dead captures a moment such as this. The entire story seems to build to a moment of such astonishing purity and beauty that it must be among the greatest passages in all of literature. The subject is transience, and the sorrow in life when we find that we grow old, and that things must pass away in time. We are haunted by memories, and by the lives and deeds of those that are no more. The dead live like ghosts among us, within us.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.