3.1  Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought

3.2  through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and

3.3  seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:

3.4  coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he

3.5  was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his

3.6  sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO

3.7  DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane,

3.8  adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if

3.9  not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

3.10  Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and

3.11  shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A

3.12  very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the

3.13  NACHEINANDER. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the

3.14  audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles

3.15  o'er his base, fell through the NEBENEINANDER ineluctably! I am getting on

3.16  nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do.

3.17  My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, NEBENEINANDER.

3.18  Sounds solid: made by the mallet of LOS DEMIURGOS. Am I walking into

3.19  eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea

3.20  money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

3.21  WON'T YOU COME TO SANDYMOUNT,

3.22  MADELINE THE MARE?

3.23  Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs

3.24  marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.

3.25  Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I

3.26  open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.

3.27  See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world

3.28  without end.3.29They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently,

3.30  FRAUENZIMMER: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet

3.31  sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty

3.32  mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp

3.33  poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence

3.34  MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride

3.35  Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing.

3.36  What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord,

3.37  hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of

3.38  all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your

3.39  OMPHALOS. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought,

3.40  nought, one.

3.41  Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had

3.42  no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut

3.43  vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from

3.44  everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.

3.45  Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the

3.46  man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her

3.47  breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the

3.48  ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A LEX ETERNA

3.49  stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son

3.50  are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring

3.51  his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred

3.52  heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With

3.53  beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a

3.54  widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

3.55  Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming,

3.56  waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds

3.57  of Mananaan.

3.58  I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half

3.59  twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.

3.60  Yes, I must

.3.61  His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My

3.62  consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother

3.63  Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt

3.64  Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell

3.65  us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I married into!

3.66  De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother,

3.67  the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And skeweyed Walter

3.68  sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no3.69wonder, by Christ!

3.70  I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take

3.71  me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

3.72  --It's Stephen, sir.

3.73  --Let him in. Let Stephen in.

3.74  A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

3.75  --We thought you were someone else.

3.76  In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over

3.77  the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the

3.78  upper moiety.

3.79  --Morrow, nephew.

3.80  He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the

3.81  eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and

3.82  common searches and a writ of DUCES TECUM. A bogoak frame over his bald

3.83  head: Wilde's REQUIESCAT. The drone of his misleading whistle brings

3.84  Walter back.

3.85--Yes, sir?

3.86  --Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

3.87  --Bathing Crissie, sir.

3.88  Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.

3.89  --No, uncle Richie ...

3.90  --Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!

3.91  --Uncle Richie, really ...

3.92  --Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.

3.93  Walter squints vainly for a chair.

3.94  --He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

3.95  --He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.

3.96  Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs

3.97  here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the better.

3.98  We have nothing in the house but backache pills.

3.99  ALL'ERTA!

3.100  He drones bars of Ferrando's ARIA DI SORTITA. The grandest number,

3.101  Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

3.102  His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air,

3.103  his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

3.104  This wind is sweeter.

3.105  Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry

3.106  you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of

3.107  them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's

3.108  library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For

3.109 whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his

3.110  kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the

3.111  moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine

3.112  faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father,--

3.113  furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! DESCENDE,

3.114  CALVE, UT NE AMPLIUS DECALVERIS. A garland of grey hair on his comminated

3.115  head see him me clambering down to the footpace (DESCENDE!), clutching a

3.116  monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll! A choir gives back menace

3.117  and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of

3.118  jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat

3.119  with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

3.120  And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it.

3.121  Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.

3.122  Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own

3.123  cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,

3.124  invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his

3.125  brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second

3.126  bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard

3.127  (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.

3.128  Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were

3.129  awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might

3.130  not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the

3.131  fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet

3.132  street. O SI, CERTO! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a

3.133  squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram alone

3.134  crying to the rain: Naked women! NAKED WOMEN! What about that, eh?

3.135  What about what? What else were they invented for?

3.136  Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was

3.137  young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause

3.138  earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one

3.139  saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles.

3.140  Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful.

3.141 O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply

3.142  deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the

3.143  world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few

3.144  thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like

3.145  a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels

3.146  that one is at one with one who once ...

3.147  The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a

3.148  damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the

3.149  unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.

3.150  Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward

3.151  sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden

3.152  of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up,

3.153  stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of

3.154  dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark

3.155  cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach

3.156  a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown

3.157  steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

3.158  He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going

3.159  there? Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the

3.160  firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.

3.161  --QUI VOUS A MIS DANS CETTE FICHUE POSITION?

3.162  --C'EST LE PIGEON, JOSEPH.

3.163  Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar

3.164  MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird,

3.165  he lapped the sweet LAIT CHAUD with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face.

3.166  Lap, LAPIN. He hopes to win in the GROS LOTS. About the nature of women he

3.167  read in Michelet. But he must send me LA VIE DE JESUS by M. Leo Taxil.

3.168  Lent it to his friend.

3.169  --C'EST TORDANT, VOUS SAVEZ. MOI, JE SUIS SOCIALISTE. JE NE CROIS PAS EN

3.170  L'EXISTENCE DE DIEU. FAUT PAS LE DIRE A MON PERE.

3.171  --IL CROIT?

3.172  --MON PERE, OUI.

3.173  SCHLUSS. He laps.