At the Finnegan's Wake reading group in Basel this evening, we discussed a phrase that is unusually simple for James Joyce's 1939 novel: "return to one peculiar sore point in the past". First, we saw this "sore point" as birth, but later, one participant suggested seeing it as Adam and Eve's fall and original sin. Then we connected it to the novel's never-quite-told story of a scene at night in Phoenix Park in Dublin involving Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, two young women, and three soldiers. That would be Earwicker's personal "sore point"; more generally, the phrase could also refer to any individual's moment of personal trauma (including those two young women's trauma). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22October 2025)