Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce. It was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. It is considered one of the most important works of Modernist Literature, although readers were often bewildered and disgusted by its studied incoherence, its occult and mystic symbolism.1 At the time of its publication ‘Abdu’l-Baha had been dead for just ten weeks. Shoghi Effendi, His successor and the leader of the Baha’i community, was translating ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and Testament into English. He was also dealing with the activities of the Covenant-Breaker Mohammad Ali who had just seized the keys to the Holy Tomb, the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh.2 James Joyce was then in his fortieth year. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Some Reflective Comments on History, 15 September 2008 with thanks to 1Dr. Joseph Collins, “James Joyce’s Amazing Chronicle,” New York Times, 28 May 1922; and 2Ruhiyyih Rabbani, The Priceless Pearl, Baha’i Pub. Trust, London, 1969, p.53.

He was intimately, obsessively
centred on his work, burrowing
into its sources in experience,
thought and in mental lodgings
that provided fascinating self-
portraits of his absolute merit
unrelated to the work of others;
of his capacity to turn observations
of a lifetime into a work of art.

He could only achieve his prime
objective—his task—his art-----
through living his life and entering
into others’ lives with an obsessive
fascination with coincidence and
verbal play and with the ability to
give distinctive timelessness and
cosmic import to one ordinarily
ordinary and one humanly human
life, the life of one man—himself.

My mental lodgings achieve my
prime task through this art as I
enter into the lives of others, my
society-its history and future-and
my own dear self and an obsessive
fascination with apparent coincidence
and verbal play as well as the capacity
to give distinctiveness, timelessness
and cosmic import to one man over
four epochs in the first century of
the Formative Age of the Baha’i Era
in a new cycle in the planetization
of humanity and its dominant principle:
human political and religious unification.

Ron Price
15 September 2008