Feast of the Epiphany

Excerpts from today's Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac -  

"Today is the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “manifestation” or “striking appearance.” Before Christianity, the word was used to record occasions when Greek gods and goddesses made appearances on earth. . .  

Around the time that Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word “epiphany.” . . .  

He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of “inadvertent revelations” and said they were “little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.” 

He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing,” the moment when “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.” 

. . . Joyce’s Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, “The Dead,” and the story ends: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”"