Flowers for Bloomsday

Today is James Joyce's Bloomsday, as I saw when I read the Writer's Almanac this morning. I read Ulysses when I was a freshman in college, in a first semester survey of great books that included Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's  Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Cervantes' Don Quixote. I read them all, somehow, wrote lengthy papers and even succeeded on exams. But that is not to imply that I remember much of what I read.

I put on flower earrings this morning in honor of Bloomsday, having been reminded by the Writer's Almanac that the Bloom is the surname of Harold and Molly Bloom, but not at all sure that flowers play any part in the novel.

When I got home tonight, I searched through our library, and found this copy of Ulysses. I scanned the book for a while in search of flowers, and failed to find any mention. 

So I googled "flowers" + James Joyce's Ulysses and found several references. The Lotus Eaters (of course!), Bloom's pseudomyn Henry Flowers, and Molly Bloom's soliloquy which includes many flower references, including, "I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses."

I began to remember the fun of reading those books and writing those papers. How much faster it is today to research flower references than it was in 1974!

Happy Bloomsday!

This jewelry contains dried flowers preserved in plastic. I love their delicate beauty. I bought them one year at the Delaplane Strawberry Festival.