The Annotated "Ulysses"/Page 083
Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble
then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. They never come back.
Fleshpots of Egypt.
He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a
mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He eyed the
horseshoe poster over the gate of college park : cyclist doubled up like a cod in
a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the
spokes : sports, sports, sports : and the hub big : college. Something to catch
the eye.
There’s Hornblower standing at the porter’s lodge. Keep him on hands :
might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower?
How do you do, sir?
Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit
around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck
for six wickets. Still Captain Buller broke a window in the Kildare street club
with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls
we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last.
Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer
than them all.
Enjoy a bath now : clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid
stream. This is my body.
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and
limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow :
his navel, bud of flesh : and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating,
floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid
floating flower.