The Annotated "Ulysses"/Page 104
in the dead letter office. Be the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That’s
the first sign when the hairs come out grey and temper getting cross. Silver
threads among the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder how he had the
gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle
that before her. It might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night
hovering here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs
when churchyards yawn and Daniel O’Connell must be a descendant I suppose
who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the same
like a big giant in the dark. Will o’the wisp. Gas of graves. Want to keep her
mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so touchy. Tell her a ghost
story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever seen a ghost? Well, I have. It
was a pitchdark night. The clock was on the stroke of twelve. Still they’d kiss
all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything
if taken young. You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love
among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we
are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled
beefsteaks to the starving gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly
wanting to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.
He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field after
field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing. Sitting or kneeling
you couldn’t. Standing? His head might come up some day above ground in
a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed the ground must be :
oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too, trim grass and edgings. His
garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well so it is. Ought to be flowers
of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best
opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It’s the
blood sinking in the earth gives new life. Same idea those jews they said killed
the christian boy. Every man his price. Well preserved fat corpse gentleman,
epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcase of William
Wilkinson, auditor and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and
six. With thanks.
I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh,
nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot
quick in damp earth lean. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy
kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried
up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing
about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.