I have always loved the visual arts because of their stillness. A painting or a sculpture does not move. It is at rest. Even if it depicts the most furious motion, that motion is caught in a moment that we call “aesthetic arrest,” and in fact that moment is the goal of the art. It turns a fleeting and perhaps otherwise inconsequential tick of the clock into a revelation. Revelation of what? Not of the content itself, necessarily. The content may be completely commonplace—a bowl of fruit, if the painter is Cezanne—or even homely, in all senses, like van Gogh’s famous pair of muddy boots. When Stephen Dedalus, the fictional counterpart of James Joyce himself in his autobiographical