A piece of a portrait : What you'd learn from the first 2 chapters in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist

Hearing two mentions of James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" in past two days, started re-reading it last night - maybe for 3rd time? Last time 15 years ago or so? Not surprised as how good it is, but am surprised at how little I remember of the first two sections/chapters: first of the artist (Stephen Dedalus) as a pupil in a boarding school, younger and smaller than most of the others, picked on a little, pushed around, homesick, becomes ill, section ends - one of the first of a million boarding-school stories, but not a horrendous school or a story of the brutal hazing and torment that we see in many others, just a boy and his loneliness and his initial questions about fate - nothing particular in the first section that would lead you to think he's on a life course toward become a great writer, other than his sensitivity to language (he recalls various childhood rhymes) and his probing thoughts about his place in the cosmos (not all that unusual for a preteen). Second section about an xmas dinner at Stephen's home, in Dublin, during a term break - he's a bit older, but not clear exactly how old, most of the section in dialog as the the family members passionately argue whether Parnell should be excommunicated for having an adulterous affair (these details seem long ago faded from history - maybe not in Ireland), but the point is how Stephen absorbs and observes the verbal fencing of adults. Each section very well presented, with great economy of detail - and at this point in novel with none of the experimental narrative techniques that emerge in later sections and begin to establish Joyce as one of the great Modernists. If you stopped reading at this point, you wouldn't know that Portrait is an extraordinary and seminal work.