“All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: `O love! O love!’ many times” (Joyce 2).
The prime vehicle of perception is imagination as imagination is how we understand the world around us. It is impossible to dissociate personal experience from the life of the mind. The narrator is plagued by images of his friend’s sister; his thoughts become almost poetic in his comparisons of infatuation. His subjective engagement with the present manifests itself into a physical display of overwhelming emotion at the relentless visions. The life of the mind is a lonely one which is presented in the narrator’s anger and shame as he stands alone at the Bazaar in the ruins of his own idealized fantasy.