Faheev

Regardless of the lateness of the hour, 2:53 AM Pacific Standard Time, what might Doug Carter say in response to a knock at the door, a casual greeting?

I did it!  I finished rereading the Ithaca episode.  One chapter to go, the early morning ramblings of Molly Bloom.

Before proceeding, has he any thoughts regarding the penultimate episode of the ultimate modernist Irish novel?

He has.

And they are?

That his (Doug's) earlier apathy has diminished: that he (Joyce) is wickedly mundane in concluding his Odyssey, quite the opposite of his beautifully transcendent ending to "The Dead": that, to him (Bloom), all men and women should live in comfort, as much as possible, and thus is his humanism affirmed: that, to the other (Stephen), his comfort should come with the removal of all demands made of him by aforementioned men and women, and thus is his aestheticism affirmed.

Favorite passages?

Yes, many.  All are too long too quote.  Despite this, one will be reproduced, impractical though the reproduction may be.

Reproduced when?

Henceforth:

"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 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 unkown to the known through the incertitude of the void." (696-7)

In light of the lateness of the hour, was it worth typing the preceding passage?

Doubtful.

Why?

The extended quotation lacks context.

Any final thoughts?

It seems that, contrary to what I wrote earlier in this post, there are transcendent bits of writing, but all are couched in the unaffected questioning of the God-narrator.  

Temperature?

It still leaves me a bit cold, notwithstanding the warmer moments spent examining the past in Bloom's mind, moments such as all sections concerning Milly's childhood.  Warm yet sad is Rudolph Bloom's fragmented suicide note; Affecting, draining.  It feels as if there should be a moment of silence, please, for the grief of Leopold, surviving son (of Rudolph) and surviving father (of Rudy).  Cold and sadness envelop pockets of warmth.  Modernism.  Everyman (Bloom) in the modern world (Joyce's Ulysses).

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