Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of
.
THE DEAD / 2199
her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen4 and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
4. The name given to many separate peat bogs between the rivers Liffey (which runs through Dublin) and Shannon (which runs through the central plain of Ireland).
.
220 0 / JAMES JOYCE
From Ulysses1
[PROTEUS] 2
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.3 Signatures of all things4 I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.5 But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno.6 Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane.7 If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander.8 Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base,9 fell through the Nebeneinander1 ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do.2 My two feet in his boots3 are at the
1. Ulysses was first published in book form on Feb. Marsh's library' (in Dublin). Stephen's highly the2, 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. The text given oretical, inquiring, musing mind contrasts sharply here has been collated with the 1932 Odyssey with the practical, humane, sensual, concrete Press edition. imagination of the book's real hero, Leopold 2. 'Proteus,' the third of the novel's eigtheen epi-Bloom, but significant parallels exist between the sodes, is so titled because of the deliberate analo-streams of consciousness of the two. Some of the gies that exist between it and the description of more important themes that emerge in Stephen's Proteus in Homer's Odyssey 4. (Joyce did not title reverie are pointed out in the footnotes. any of the episodes in Ulysses, but the names are 3. I.e., the sense of sight provides an unavoidable his; he used them in correspondence and in talk way ('ineluctable modality') of knowing reality, with friends.) the knowledge thus provided being a kind of In the Odyssey Proteus is the sea god, who con-'thought through [the] eyes.' tinually alters his shape: when Telemachus, Ulys-4. From Jakob Bohme (1575?1624), German ses' son, asks Menelaus for help in finding his mystic. father, Menelaus tells him that he encountered 5. Transparency. Stephen is speculating on Aris- Proteus by the seashore on the island of Pharos 'in totle's view of perception as developed in his De front of Egypt,' and that, by holding on to him Anima. while he changed from one shape to another, he 6. One tradition held that Aristotle was bald, with was able to force him to tell what had happened to thin legs, small eyes, and a lisp. Aristotle is also Ulysses and the other Greek heroes of the Trojan traditionally supposed to have inherited consider- War. In Joyce's narrative Stephen Dedalus (who, able wealth and to have been presented with a for- like Homer's Telemachus, is looking for a father, tune by his former pupil Alexander the Great. The but not in the literal 'consubstantial' sense) is Italian phrase, Dante's description of Aristotle in walking alone by the Dublin shore, 'along Sandy-the Inferno, means 'the master of them that mount strand,' speculating on the shifting shapes know.' of things and the possibility of knowing truth by 7. What is not transparent (opposite of 'diaappearances. phane').
Stephen meditates first on the 'modality of the 8. After one another (German). Stephen, with visible' and on the mystical notion that the Dem-eyes shut, is now sensing reality through the sense iurge, God's subordinate, writes his signature on of sound only: unlike sight, sound falls on the sense all things; then on the 'modality of the audible,' of hearing in chronological sequence, one sound closing his eyes and trying to know reality through after another. the sense of hearing. As he continues his walk, the 9. 'What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
