A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

The pen is a necessarily isolating tool. And as much as art unites and brings together, the artist is a bastion of loneliness. I wonder, too, if the artist must not have some disdain for those around him, hatred for life. The path from Henderson to Portrait to Steppenwolf is a path of hermits and voices crying out in the desert. Perhaps true artists are prophets and their artwork their prophecy. I have yet to hear of a prophet who wasn't a piece to a different puzzle.
The stories of our hearing are the stories of the life we all are not living yet are feeling. Just as there are really no two things that are the same (to be the same is to be one) and just as all things other are more truly the same (to be is to be like) so it is we love to hear stories about outcasts and aliens. But the only good outcast is the one who is trying to break in. What is the story of the outcast who has happily said goodbye and never looked back? All the same we are keepers deep down of our own secret alienation for this is what keeps us distinct and let's us live. Our unique nature is our shield. That we are not completely others (what others are) lets us go on with the next day; that we are not completely others (separate from) let's us live this day. We have to know that we are not alone to breathe, but we have to know that we are all alone in order to dream. And our lives are strange, strange mixtures of breath and dream.
Perhaps Joyce should have entitled his novel Searching for the Green Rose.