Ulysses
animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of
vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the
pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation
in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of
clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of
the recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and
the shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination,
_videlicet_, 5 5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical
progression.
In what manners did she reciprocate?
She remembered: on the 27th anniversary of his birth she presented to
him a breakfast moustachecup of imitation Crown Derby porcelain ware.
She provided: at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases had
been made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his
necessities, anticipating his desires. She admired: a natural
phenomenon having been explained by him to her she expressed the
immediate desire to possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of
his science, the moiety, the quarter, a thousandth part.
What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist,
make to Stephen, noctambulist?
To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and
Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately
above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of
his host and hostess.
What various advantages would or might have resulted from a
prolongation of such an extemporisation?
For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the
host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the
hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian
pronunciation.
Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a
hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent
eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew’s
daughter?
Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother
through daughter.
To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest
return a monosyllabic negative answer?
If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at
Sydney Parade railway station, 14 October 1903.
What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the
host?
A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment
of Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding), 26 June 1903, vigil of the
anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).
Was the proposal of asylum accepted?
Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.
What exchange of money took place between host and guest?
The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money (£
1-7-0), one pound seven shillings sterling, advanced by the latter to
the former.
What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,
declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?
To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the
residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal
instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate a
series of static, semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues,
places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident
in the same place), the _Ship_ hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street
(W. and E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10
Kildare street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles
street, a public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a
conjunction of two or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection
of a right line drawn between their residences (if both speakers were
resident in different places).
What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually
selfexcluding propositions?
The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert
Hengler’s circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive
particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring
to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had
publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his
(the clown’s) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the
summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches
on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due to and
received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand
Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible,
circuitous or direct, return.
Was the clown Bloom’s son?
No.
Had Bloom’s coin returned?
Never.
Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?
Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to
amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and
international animosity.
He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible,
eliminating these conditions?
There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct
from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of
destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of
the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and
death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human
females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable
accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies
and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital
criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make
terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres
of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital
growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through
maturity to decay.
Why did he desist from speculation?
Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other
more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena
to be removed.
Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding
syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational
reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon
the incertitude of the void.
Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?
Not verbally. Substantially.
What comforted his misapprehension?
That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from
the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.
In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the
exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation
effected?
Lighted Candle in Stick borne by
BLOOM
Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by
STEPHEN
With what intonation _secreto_ of what commemorative psalm?
The 113th, _modus peregrinus: In exitu Israël de Egypto: domus Jacob de
populo barbaro_.
What did each do at the door of egress?
Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his
head.
For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?
For a cat.
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the
guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from
the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his
companion of various constellations?
Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in
incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous
scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an
observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000
ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of
Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles)
distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of
Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and
sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could
be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in
1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of
the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality
evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote
futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of
allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?
Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of
the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences
concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives
and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the
incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible
molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single
pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white
bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other
bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies
of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component
bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division
till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never
reached.
Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?
Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of
the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a
number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such
magnitude and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power
of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes
of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would
have to be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its
printed integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds
of millions, billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of
every series containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to
the utmost kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.
Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their
satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and
moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?
Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism,
normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons, when
elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere
suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as the
line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was
approximated from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo,
when proposing this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a
working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more
adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might
subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian,
Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an
apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite
differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would
probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to
vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity.
And the problem of possible redemption?
The minor was proved by the major.