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.

This is the famous opening sentence of James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, first published in 1939 after years of serial excerpts and revision. Joyce composed the book in Paris during the 1920s–30s while coping with severe eye problems and family strains, pursuing an experimental “night language” dense with multilingual puns and cyclical structures. The sentence situates the reader in Dublin’s geography—Eve and Adam’s is a church by the River Liffey; Howth Head lies to the northeast—while also signaling the Wake’s governing idea of recurrence: the narrative loops, like a river’s course and like history itself, back toward its beginning.

The line announces Finnegans Wake’s central principle: circularity. The river’s movement (“riverrun”) becomes a figure for time, memory, and history flowing in loops rather than straight lines. Joyce fuses local Dublin landmarks with mythic and biblical resonances (“Eve and Adam’s”), implying that the everyday and the archetypal continually interpenetrate. The phrase “commodius vicus of recirculation” is a mock-scholarly flourish that also hints at Giambattista Vico’s theory of historical cycles, a key intellectual backdrop for the novel. Ending “back to Howth Castle and Environs” points to return as destiny: the book’s language and plot are designed to circle back on themselves, making beginnings and endings interchangeable.