Finnegans Wake Chapter I.5 discusses the marvelous and confusing letter of ALP (which represents Finnegans Wake itself). Joyce extensively compares the Wake to the Book of Kells, an Irish artifact of exquisite beauty: it’s a medieval copy of the Gospels that is lavishly illuminated.

This post briefly examines how Finnegans Wake makes use of the Book of Kells, and especially its “Tunc Page.”

 In chapter I.8, the washerwomen describe ALP arriving

with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door!

These can be interpreted as the gifts of the universe to each of us, for we are all her children. Her gifts to us are like gifts we dreamed we gave her, in this dream we call life, because we are ALP also: I think here of Carl Sagan’s idea that humans are the cosmos’ way of knowing itself; in the same way, we are the cosmos’ way of giving itself gifts. Our experience is a long series of gifts.