“The ciborium had come to him.”

Here's a take on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that never occurred to me the first time through:

In the novel, the competing claims of religion and art are laid out, and in chapters 3 and 4, especially, we see them at war: One thing not often remarked upon in the criticism of Portrait, however, is that within the novel's pages, it is far from clear that art comes out on top. In the sermons of chapter 3, a poetic and rhetorical inventiveness is brought to bear that dwarfs anything our young artist himself musters; the mystic, scholar, and writer Thomas Merton, for instance, converted to Catholicism as a result of reading them. By comparison, the writing that Stephen himself produces during the course of the novel is pale and bloodless…

-Kevan J. H. Dettmar, introduction to Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Portrait and Dubliners, 2004

It's true: despite his artistic potential, Stephen never makes a true artist of himself, even by the time we see him in Ulysses. Joyce seems to have hidden remarkable secrets in the gap between the life of his fictional protagonist and his own.