Paper and Porcelain’s Reviews > Dubliners > Status Update

Dismissing the author’s ambiguous intent on displaying senescence to make the grandiosity of growth and deterioration - grandchildren and grandparents - remember they are past and future versions of one another, or to study with figments of societal imagination learning how the two coincide, the fifth and sixth anecdotes indulge in extreme-wide shots of the cinematic language that triggers Sonder, an overlooked truth due to humane self-fixation, rare realizations that others are occupied by obligations, expectations, and searches for purpose like us. A homeless bystander leaning a little lower onto the bridge’s guardrails may signal his surrender to life, proving the dreamed hypothesis of water feeling like concrete if approached at high velocity by the time we turn back to observe the eyewitnesses’ screams. An isolated lady on the park bench might have been waiting for a date which in alternate timelines would have proposed to her, but in this one she sits there until sundown when be takes the hint. James Joyce humbles our inwardly designated importance and begs us to exercise muscles motoring the neck and corneas - realizing the littlest actions’ butterfly effect on our species-bound kinfolk’s appraisal of their life that day. It does not tire us to keep our chin up and swing our strands of compassion around more carefully.