What does this quote mean to you?

[Itsonlytrung]

Everybody has their own interpolation on what certain phrase may mean, and i want to know what does this quote, by James Joyce, mean to you:

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at lease that if no more, thought through my eyes" (Ulysses, Joyce).

Here is how i came to it and what i thought of it:

After reading that from a book that I randomly picked up, I was stupefied to numbness and paralysis. For the past week I have want nothing more than to take my brain and slam it against a chalk board and study the mechanism of every my sense. Joyce has single handedly penned a sentence that summarized existentialism with grace and elegance incomparable to those before and after him, since.

[Vautrin]

I more or less see it as a fancy way of saying, "seeing is believing."

[Dinkleberry2010]

Right; Joyce is more or less saying seeing is believing, and one cannot escape the reality of mode or form. I don't see any reference to existentialism in that statement. Why didn't Joyce just come out plainly and say what he meant? Because Joyce was Joyce, and he liked to play games with language.

[Itsonlytrung]

Right; Joyce is more or less saying seeing is believing, and one cannot escape the reality of mode or form. I don't see any reference to existentialism in that statement. Why didn't Joyce just come out plainly and say what he meant? Because Joyce was Joyce, and he liked to play games with language.
It's interesting that you both think it means nothing more than "seeing is believing," while i believe that it has more to do with existentialism than that.

what i took from it is that the modality of our converging senses define what reality is, but there is a sense that there exist a higher dimension of cognition that our sense can not transpire so that the sense can materialize this level of cognition into concrete reality. This level of cognition may be creativity, reflective conscience, or god.

[Dinkleberry2010]

Why didn't Joyce just come out and say that? No, Joyce had to play games. I bet he chuckled when he wrote that and thought to himself: that is such a clever remark--they'll be trying to figure out just what it was I meant a hundred years from now--hehehe, I am so clever.

[Itsonlytrung]

Joyce does have a way with words. Dubliners is a fine work without much psychological labyrinth.

[ennison]

I fear he was intoxicated. Ineluctably

[Vautrin]

I fear he was intoxicated. Ineluctably

haha! Maybe he meant to say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder?"