Today, we read as fas as: intimations of proximate dawn (Gabler 17.1248) (Penguin p. 827)
From the garden, they see the light that has gone on in Molly's window.
They urinate too (they have both been drinking and need to rather badly).
Bloom all the while keeps his mind on the physical aspects of the male organ
(remembering also a urinating contest among boys when he was at school, where he came
first as he reached highest point), while Stephen thinks about intellectual issues around Christ's
circumcision. Bloom, then, unlocks the garden door, the men shake hands and, as
Stephen is walking away, the bells of St George's church can be heard. They
bring back to Stephen the lines "Liliata rutilantium, Turma circumdet" and thus the memory
of his mother's deathbed, and to Bloom the men who attended Dignam's funeral
with him that morning.
It is hard to tell whether the men are indeed in bed or if this is Bloom merely thinking they are.
Bloom and Stephen walk out into Bloom's garden and, in a moment
reminiscent of Virgil and Dante at the end of the Inferno, look at the "spectacle" of the stars. The men
continue to converse on various topics (and we are reminded of how Stephen earlier
described their constellation as spelling W for William Shakespeare and marking
the poet's birth). They seem to be on different tracts, however, with Stephen
veering on the side of religion, while Bloom tends towards more scientific or practical
considerations. Bloom remains sceptical of the existence of a heaven beyond the
earth, and- seeing no method of proceeding from the known earth to the unknown
heaven - he rejects the idea of a saviour. However, he still enjoys the
aesthetic beauty of the universe and the suggestions of certain astronomical
theories that connect the celestial with what goes on on Earth. For example, he
muses on the idea that woman's nature reflects that of the moon in many
respects:
What special
affinities 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 inaffirmative
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. (17.1157) (p. 823)
A note about how to read the various voices in this chapter (or about
how we don't know how to read them):
It is often not clear, how far to voice asking the questions and the one
providing the answers on the one hand and that of the characters on the other
intermingle. Consider for example this passage:
Where were
the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of
that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north?
Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack
Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Ned Lambert (in
bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in
bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave). (17.1235) (p. 827)
It is hard to tell whether the men are indeed in bed or if this is Bloom merely thinking they are.
