Connections

I was reading an excellent post by Sheila O’Malley on Before Sunrise (which I found in a link on her post celebrating Richard Linklater’s birthday today) when she revealed a detail I’d never noticed before (and I say this as someone who’s seen the movie more than 10 times. The only movie I’ve seen more times is Amadeus). This detail is that Céline and Jesse meet and start their walk on June 16 — Bloomsday, when a young James Joyce went on a walk with Nora Barnacle, his future wife and muse (it’s also the day — June 16, 1904 — when the whole of Ulysses takes place). To clarify, June 16 is the day Céline and Jesse met on the train, June 17 is when they went their separate ways. And then I realized something.

As some long-time readers know, I lived in Japan for several years. Notice the dates in that linked entry. I took off on June 15. I landed in Japan on June 16. My first full day there was June 17. Had I left a year earlier, I would’ve arrived exactly 100 years after James and Nora went on that fateful walk.

The only difference between the June 16 events listed above and my own is that mine didn’t involve falling in love with a woman. It involved falling in love with a country. More than that, those three years witnessed a transformation in how I viewed myself, others, the US, and the world. To quote O’Malley (who quotes Joyce), I “stopped living ‘in fragments,'” and if I feel somewhat fragmented now, it’s only because my connections have weakened over time.

Advertisement