Extract

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.

Snow is general all over Ireland, falling on the living and the dead, on the crooked crosses where a young man lies buried whom a girl once loved enough to stand shivering in the rain. This story, the final and greatest of the Dubliners collection, follows Gabriel Conroy through an evening of music and dancing at his aunts' holiday party, then strips away his self-regard in a single devastating revelation. Gretta tells him of Michael Furey, and Gabriel understands that there are depths of passion he has never touched. Joyce was twenty-five when he wrote it, already in exile, seeing Dublin with the tenderness of distance. The closing passage is among the most beautiful in English prose, a cadence in which every soul is levelled by the snow.