Horrifying, disgusting, disturbing and funny all at once

I've been reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's incredibly good, much better than I expected.

Today I read JJ's recount of a priest's lecture about Hell and judgment given to a group of young Catholic schoolboys on "retreat." This bit goes for pages, but it's loaded with brilliant bits. This one stood out for me. It made me cringe and laugh (out loud.)

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone too which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench: and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and un-breathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then image this sickening stench , multiplied a million fold and a million fold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

I wish I knew why that made me laugh because I don't think it was intended to be funny, at least not in the context of the story.

Thank you, Frank

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years

So opens Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Angela's Ashes, Sadly, Frank passed away yesterday at 78 of skin cancer-related complications.

Angela's Ashes, if not the best (non-fiction) book I've ever read, is certainly my favorite. It moved me in a way that no other book has. Mr. McCourt's ability to express sorrow in vivid but often humorous ways is unmatched. Though I'm hardly a literature expert, I'm somewhat well read. His lyrical style is as good as any I've seen.

Something about his writing, including his subsequent books, 'Tis and Teacher Man, reached all the way to my core. I found Angela's Ashes at a time in my life when I was trying to find myself. As a spoiled American I certainly could not relate to the depths of the poverty and misery experienced by McCourt familyand their confederates in Limerick, Ireland during the Great Depression. But there was a familiarity to it all.

At that time in my life, in the process of trying to find my own identity, I latched on pretty heavily to my Irish ancestry. Looking back, I think that was my way of connecting to my father who gave me most of my Irish blood. Perhaps, though, there was more to it. Maybe, just maybe, our DNA has a "memory" of its own. Those ancestors of mine that left Limerick, Ireland for America in the late 1880's likely experienced their own "miserable Irish Catholic childhoods." In a symbolic sense, Angela's Ashes, for me, was akin to finding one's great-grandfather's diary in the trunk in the attic. It wasn't my great-great-grandfather's story, but it certainly could have been.

Whatever the case may be, Frank's writing helped patch some holes in my existent. More accurately, Angela's Ashes caused me to look at myself and those who came before me with more depth of clarity, with more of an eye toward the long strands that connect our history (or family history) to us today.

Reading 'Tis and Teacher Man were less heady than all that. All stories that have beginnings need endings and these two books rounded out the story that we all wanted to see end happily. By those books I was reminded that no matter where you come from, you can make something of yourself with a lot determination and a little dumb luck. It never hurts to be reminded of that.

All that aside, Mr. McCourt's books are fantastic reads. They are highly entertaining. For the hours of reading pleasure I had, if nothing else, Frank deserves a big thank you.

God bless you, Frank. Thank you for sharing your incredible life with me/us.