Ruby Ithaca Ulysses # 21

Jaeren this week.

The chapter about both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus returning to 7 Eccles Street, the Ithaca of Dublin is called the chapter of questions and answers. Maybe because of the painful things Bloom presumed waiting for him at home, he searched for every way possible to distance him from the
real fact, and in all possible ways procrastinating the moment he had to face his fears. (Had Molly been unfaithful or not?)
The first 3/4 of the chapter, Bloom and Dedalus, (He and he), discuss everything under the sun in minutiae details. All actions are also described the same thorough way.
I wondered where have I read a book in similar style? A.A. Milne, (the Disney version doesn't count), and his stories of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh.
So this week I have been reading Joyce by daytime, (lots of words used in this chapter, which even giant Webster had trouble to explain, and I could not lie in bed with two tons of books beside me). Therefore A. A. Milne became my bed buddy, and the conversations between Piglet and Pooh as always gave me many good laughs and sweet sleep.
I did in fact look up to find out who of the two great authors inspired whom. Joyce won the price or race here too. Ulysses was published in 1923 and Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.

The little white chair from my childhood, my teddy, Serina's book.

While Bloom was making Dedalus cocoa they discussed every topic under the sun, in the universe, as a matter of the fact, macro and micro cosmos, religion, psychology, politics, agreements and disagreements. They laid plans for the future and by sunrise said goodbye. The only thing Bloom could not offer Dedalus, was a "shelter from the storm," a room for the homeless.
He had to literally face the music, find out what had been going on, while Molly and Boylan had been rehearsing for the upcoming concert.
Did he find evidence of foul play?
He did.
Even so he did not confront his wife, but laid down beside her, fearing that his enemy had been there just some hours earlier.
Why?

Yours truly seeking shelter, while reading Ulysses on a local beach. Shortly after, I fell asleep.


"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 umplumbed 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 billions 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 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 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." James Joyce


If you double click some red attached to the divers foot.



This matchbox lay in the car Serina inherited after my dad. As the car was handed over to a cousin, Gunnar put the box over in our Land Rover. We were camping this week, and needed light. Gunnar fetched the box, and we suddenly met my dad again. One safety pin, one paper clip and some valve parts put there for emergency use. Ten years ago.

"What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump."James Joyce

Boat passing lighthouse at sundown

"He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.

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As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived." James Joyce

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today