She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her the chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ breeches and The most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

From “Ulysses,” by James Joyce

James Joyce’s vast knowledge of religion, literature, and languages becomes evident in every paragraph of his masterpiece, Ulysses. The fusion of words, use of archaic terms such as “agenbite of inwit,” his grotesque distortions of social reality, and his contempt for the prevailing religiosity result in a literary portrait as abstract and beautiful as Picasso’s Guernica. And yet, now and then, his exceptional ability to nail down a subject  also materializes throughout his novel: “It is the age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.”