Literature

Edward Quinn, James Joyce's Dublin, with Selected Writings from Joyce's Works (Nice, 1974). 

Page 41 "He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the ‘Herald’ and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realized that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night, alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory – if anyone remembered him."
 Dubliners (no page number given).