Finnegans Wake is a book that begins midsentence:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

In this essay, I bracket the meat between the italicized first and last lines of Finnegans Wake, and the bolded lines of my own wake. Starting at the end, and returning to the beginning.

People will say it's unreadable, but I argue here that human beings are hard to read, and once we can understand ourselves, books are just books. Moreover, this is a paradigmatic change in public consciousness that has taken place over the last century. There isn't something wrong with you if you have trouble making sense of poetry's purpose. I avoided poetry until I turned 27 and transitioned!

We can't understand our present using our past, at least not quite in the way I initially thought. We must now look at all books ever written as human artifacts, as portals into understanding the species who created them. A world in which books are unreadable is a world I couldn't imagine living in, and so I chose not to live in it.

Here is the scary and brilliant thing: the less you know about Finnegans Wake the better. Everything is on the page, insofar as the words are nearly everything to you. The most interesting things are in your mind. As I further examine the personal archive of my past self both in terms of Tvordis, the elaborate fabrication I wove as a pre-trans person, and the writing I produced for 10 years of not knowing I was trans, I discovered to my horror that I had been writing my own little Wake all along and hiding all of the best bits for myself. I hated those pieces with all of my being until I could build the structure with which to love them.

And so,

(beginning) "Away, alone at last, and loved! Along the (628)

**yeah, this isn't going to hurt a bit. (end)**

Finnegans Wake is the only book one of most respected schoolmates insisted that I not read. It's not meant to be read, he said. "It is a dream, presumably of Finnegan, but it doesn't have a plot, it doesn't have characters really," Let us not be hasty and so fearful of our loving god.

Many reader's guides have been written for this text, so let me attempt a non-reader's guide to be read in fewer than 10 minutes and digested in less.

Finnegans Wake is the reader's punishment for proving Joyce's personal hypothesis, Ulysses, correct. By making him famous and killing his work so thoroughly with every type of ammunition: proper interpretation, overinterpretation, misinterpretation, reinterpretation, censorship, plagiarism, and surpassment by other writers in his cast.

"It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape,” wrote T. S. Eliot of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)." Let us thank god that escape has been attempted so valiantly nonetheless.

Jim is not bitter that he was so misunderstood in his time and even worse now. Eliot is not spared in the Wake, but that doesn't have much to do with us. Joyce intends to show us that neither this work nor his last can be comprehended with the mind. Where Ulysses is a book that can be easily apprehended by those with the courage to listen to Bloom's suffering, Finnegans Wake is ingested as a knot and excreted as a string, or it sits in the digestive tract and waits until circumstances improve.