I am reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I thought Nabokov was the greatest English-language prose stylist I had ever read, but after reading Joyce, I may have to modify that judgement. Here is an excerpt from the thrilling final pages of Chapter IV, in which Stephen Dedalus finally wrests his freedom from the stifling influence and life-denying repression of the Catholic Church, and every other aspect of miserable conformity in Irish society:
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.
—Stephaneforos!
What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—cerements, the linens of the grave?
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.