Themes
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
— James Joyce • Finnegans Wake (1939; second edition 1950)
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
Four ordinary verbs compress the movement of whole lives into a single sentence. The repeated sounds make living, laughter and affection feel closely linked, before departure brings the sequence to a close. Its lightness does not remove the sense that everything described is passing.
Context reviewed