Ineluctable modality of the visible: Stephen walks Sandymount trying to make that phrase into a shore he can stand on. Seaspawn and seawrack, a rusty boot, coloured signs on the tide. The eye takes them whether he consents or not. He shuts his eyes and hears his boots crush shell and wrack, a stride at a time through short times of space, and keeps them shut until the thought of falling in the dark is enough. He opens them. The world had been there all the time without him, and would be. That is the morning's first answer, and it does not comfort him.
He passes the way to his aunt's house and does not take it. Bills, whisky, a chair that is not there: he has already refused the visit in his head. The strand gives him Paris instead, Kevin Egan in exile, a son taught The Boys of Kilkenny and already forgetting. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. His feet sink where he came nearer the edge than he meant. Behind the walk the cold room of the tower is waiting, and the key is in Mulligan's keeping. He will not sleep there when this night comes. A bloated dog on the wrack, then a live dog running the sweep of sand. He stays still, stick in hand, unwilling to be its master or its mark. You will not be master of others or their slave. The sentence is cleaner than the boots he is walking in.
Two figures come shoreward, cocklepickers, and a girl with a side eye at his Hamlet hat. He sits on a rock and tries a line for a mouth, a vampire through the storm, and finds he has no paper from the library. He has Deasy's letter. He tears the blank end off the sheet that thanks an editor for the hospitality of his columns, and scribbles. Who, he asks, would ever read signs written on a white field. He lies back at full stretch, hat tilted, and under the brim counts the creases of the day he is not spending. Perhaps there was someone. He turns his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air, high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.
Coming Up in Chapter 4
The narrative shifts to Leopold Bloom as he begins his day, introducing the man whose path will intersect with Stephen's in unexpected ways. We'll see how an ordinary morning routine can reveal the depths of a marriage and the quiet heroism of daily life..
