Ulysses
chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs
folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of
ladies’ grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual
position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer
extremities and the third at their point of junction.
What did Bloom see on the range?
On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left
(larger) hob a black iron kettle.
What did Bloom do at the range?
He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron
kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to
let it flow.
Did it flow?
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of
2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of
filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial
plant cost of £ 5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen
of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a
distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving
tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace
bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and
daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below the
sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and
waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of
the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for
purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of
recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals
as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding
their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch
meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by a
reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the
corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the
detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers,
solvent, sound.
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 8000 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 islands, its persistent formation of
homothetic islands, 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
seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies,
freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers,
cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, 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 well 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 variety 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, icefloes: its
docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric
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 effluvia in lacustrine
% marshes,
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 everchanging 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 additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?
Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric
energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the
lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.
Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?
Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and
recuperation.
What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the
agency of fire?
The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of
ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was
communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral
masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the
foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn
derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat
(radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous
ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such combustion,
was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source of
calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated
through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part
reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the
temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in
temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal
units needed to raise 1 pound of water from 50° to 212° Fahrenheit.
What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?
A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at
both sides simultaneously.
For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?
To shave himself.
What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from
shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if
unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at
incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a
cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal
noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a
postman’s double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering,
relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he
sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving
and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected
and applied adhered: which was to be done.
Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?
Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine
feminine passive active hand.
What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting
influence?
The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human
blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their
natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic
surgery.
What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the
kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal
breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a
moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white
goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly
copper, and a phial of aromatic (violet) comfits. On the middle shelf a
chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four
conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of
Plumtree’s potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and
containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and
Co’s white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink
tissue paper, a packet of Epps’s soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne
Lynch’s choice tea at 2/- per lb in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a
cylindrical canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two
onions, one, the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish,
bisected with augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model
Dairy’s cream, a jug of brown crockery containing a naggin and a
quarter of soured adulterated milk, converted by heat into water,
acidulous serum and semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity
subtracted for Mr Bloom’s and Mrs Fleming’s breakfasts, made one
imperial pint, the total quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a
halfpenny and a small dish containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the
upper shelf a battery of jamjars (empty) of various sizes and
proveniences.
What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?
Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets,
numbered 8 87, 88 6.
What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?
Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction,
preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official
and definitive result of which he had read in the _Evening Telegraph_,