Jane and Prudence

Should we have something to eat before we go, do you think?" Jane asked. ‘I believe refreshments are provided but they may not be till rather late.’ 

‘Perhaps a glass of sherry and a biscuit?’ suggested Prudence hopefully. “One doesn’t really want much to eat...’ but how we need a drink, she continued to herself; the idea of facing thy whist drive without one was quite terrifying. 

‘Oh, yes, that would be the thing,’ said Jane quickly, with he head bent. She found herself quite unable to look at Prudence, whose eyelids were startlingly and embarrassingly green, glistening with some greasy preparation which had little flecks of silver in it. Was this what one had to do nowadays when one was unmarried? she wondered. What hard work it must kx, always remembering to add these little touches; there was something primitive about it, like the young African smearing himself with red cam-wood before he went courting. The odd and rather irritating thing about it was, though, that Nicholas was gazing at Prudence with admiration; it was quite noticeable. So it really did work. Jane studied her own face in the looking glass above the sideboard and it looked to her just the same as when Nicholas used to gaze at it with admiration. Would he look at her with renewed interest if she had green eyelids? she wondered

The Violent Bear it Away

My great uncle said he hated to admit it that his own sister was a whore but he had to say it to say the truth, the boy said. 

Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she was a whore, the stranger said. He was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That's all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore. And anyway, he asked slyly, what do you know about whores? Where have you ever run up on one of them? 

Certainly I know what one of them is, the boy said. 

The Bible was full of them. He knew what they were and to what they were liable to come, and just as Jezebel was discovered by dogs, an arm here and a foot there, so said his great-uncle, it had almost been with his own mother and grandmother. 

&

It was not to be wondered at, the old man would say, that the schoolteacher was no better than he was with such a father as he had. The man, an insurance salesman, wore a straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a cigar and when you told him his soul was in danger, he offered to sell you a policy against any contingency. He said he was a prophet too, a prophet of life insurance, for every right-thinking Christian, he said, knew that it was his Christian duty to protect his family and provide for them in the event of the unexpected. There was no use treating with him, the old man said; his brain was as slick as his eyeballs and the truth would no more soak into it than rain would penetrate tin. The schoolteacher, with Tarwater blood in him, at least had his father’s strain diluted. “Good blood flows in his veins,” the old man said. “And good blood knows the Lord and there ain’t a thing he can do about having it. There ain't a way in the world he can get rid of it.” 

&

The boy only stared at him, his eyes filmed with a dull cast of nausea. 

“The great dignity of man,” his uncle said, “is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I'm content with it. It’s enough to be a man.” There was a light ring in his voice. He watched the boy closely to see if he had struck a chord.

On Joyce

 From Louis Gillet

I had never seen him without his sombre myopic lenses which seemed to be part of his person. Now the mask appeared bare, abruptly confessing its truth. At the moment of death, a relaxation takes place, the face seems washed as if a hand had wiped the wrinkles of life from it. This occasionally imparts a spark of youth to the dead, whence the medieval belief that they all have in heaven the common and perfect age of thirty-three. 

But here the dead preserved an attitude of combat. It was indeed the prominent forehead, the slender cheeks and sharply-etched bones, the determined chin, the long phiz—that is the word—of a Don Quixote just lifting his vizor. I still saw defiance in it. This was not the look of someone vanquished, of someone defunct—as termed by the beautiful language in which the Church embalms its dead, defunctos, those that have resigned, relieved themselves from existence—there was never so much haughtiness, so much inflexibility, never a look of pride more abrupt! It was the No! of the unsubdued, the refusal of a rebellious angel. 

Ulysses

 Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses without thorns. 

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain. 

O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers. She didn’t know what to do 

To keep it up 

To keep it up. 

&

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He doesn’t know who is here nor care. 

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he’d have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it. 

O, poor Robinson Crusoe, How could you possibly do so? 

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding let it down that way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow’s. They’re so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one cofhn. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman’s house is his cofin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies, the same idea. 

&

 We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. L 

Haines opened his newbought book. 

— I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. 

The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street: 

— England expects .. . 

Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter. Wa You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. 

andering AEngus I call him. 

—I am sure he has an idée fixe, Haines said, pinching his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it would be likely to be. Such persons always have. 

Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely. 

— They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. 

The joy of creation . . . — Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s rather interesting because Professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that. 

Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to unload her tray. 

— He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he write anything for your movement? 

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily. 

— Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years. 

— Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon. Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all. 

He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup. 

— This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t want to be imposed on. 

Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. 

&

— Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. 

So I saw there was going to be bit of a dust. Bob’s a queer chap when the porter’s up in him; so says I just to make talk: 

— How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf? 

— I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that . . . 

— You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who? 

— With Dignam, says Alf. 

— Is it Paddy? says Joe. 

— Yes, says Alf. Why? | 

— Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe. 

— Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf. 

— Ay, says Joe. 

— Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff. 

— Who’s dead? says Bob Doran. 

— You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm. 

— What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five .. .What? .. . and Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s ... What? Dignam dead? 

— What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about. . . ’ 

— Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are. 

— Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow. 

— Paddy? says Alf. 

— Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him. 

— Good Christ! says Alf. 

Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted. 

&

and on the other a happily chosen position, succubitus felix, of the passive element. The other problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways, Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleges, and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas—there, he said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agrecable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statucs such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or ofhcial, culminating in the exposture of newborn infants, the practice of criminal abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former (we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which often balk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained. Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet’s words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law of anticipation by which organism in which morbous germs have taken up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement, which, though productive of pain to some of ....

&

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? 

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in scaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddics, freshcts, spatcs, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maclstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its varicty of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iccflocs: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, clectric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its efAuvia in lacustrine marches, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. 

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap? 

To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller. 

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer? That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language. 

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot? 

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius. 

&

What special afhnities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? 

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inafhrmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. 

What were habitually his final meditations? 

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop am wander, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.