A Passage from My Passage

Stephen's soul has been briefly awakened, and he catches a fleeting glimpse of his higher calling. But such transcendent experiences, like manna in the wilderness, seem to evaporate like the morning dew, drifting out of immediate consciousness into some quiet chamber of the soul. Stephen sinks back into lower realms of consciousness: the realm of the intellect, of reason and rationality.
     And so we see Stephen a few years later, as a university student trying to figure out the scholastic systems of the great philosophers. His mind is totally occupied with metaphysical questions. He has become an academician — hardly the young artist  whose soul had cried out with simplicity and purest passion, "Heavenly God!"
     Nevertheless, there is still something in his soul deeper than reason, larger than life, something that yearns to be satisfied and cries out to him, something leading him onward, ever onward. Stephen stops to watch birds overhead.

"What birds were they? . . . He watched their flight; bird after bird . . . he listened to their cries.... The inhuman clamor soothed his ears.... Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their shrill twofold cry, watching their flight? For an augury of good or evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of life and have not perverted that order by reason." [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 224-225 passim.]

To Swedenborg, the movement and beauty of birds represents human intellect as it seeks to be led and taught by the Divine.

"The man who receives wisdom from God is like a bird  flying high which surveys everything in the gardens, woods, and farms beneath, and flies towards those things that are of use to it." [Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christian Religion, #69, Swedenborg Foundation, New York.]

— Ray Silverman, "Welcome, O Life!", in Chrysalis, Preface, p. viii, Volume VIII, Issue 2, "Work," Summer 1993.

On a personal note: I like passages like this one that are a good explication of a well stated thought — a great response to a wonderful passage from an outstanding book by a renowned author. I have been composing a novel for many years which incorporates a hundred passages from all sources that contain the phrase "hither and thither" and I am a long-time reader and admirer of Swedenborg's wisdom from the Lord. To find that both are in close proximity in a passage from a book I read forty years ago, before I began either of the above journeys, is a marvelously serendipitous God-instance.
— JRH