"It is a May morning of luminous loveliness. The sunlight glows through a delicate muslin mist, the soft air is fragrant with the smell of lilac, and out over the tawny reaches of Sandymount strand, where Stephen Dedalus once trod upon seaspawn and seawrack while seeking myopically to make out the signatures of all the things he was sent there to read, the pale sky shines and shimmers like the inner skin of a vast soap bubble." -- from 'Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir' by John Banville