Bloomsday

June 16, 1904 is legendary for two events, one of which never really happened. The date exists in reality and in fancy. On that day, the young author James Joyce escorted his bride-to-be, Nora Barnacle, to Ringsend, a village outside Dublin. In a separate iteration of that selfsame day, Leopold Bloom, advertising salesman and Everyman, embarked on the most sublimely banal excursion in modern literature. If Ulysses is an allegory of the modern experience, then it's all the more fitting that we, its readers, commemorate the journey of that novel's hero as though it really happened -- a veritable holiday. What a thing of wonders is our collective memory!