James Joyce's Ulysses: A Dublin Tour
17. Ithaca

     What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
     Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford Place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street, north: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

     Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
     Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse. (619)

Turning left from Gardiner Street into Gardiner Place. Temple Street is the next street on the right, marked by the grey building on its corner.

     What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?
     The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles on the two bookshelves opposite.

     Catalogue these books.
     Thom's Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886
     Denis Florence M'Carthy's Poetical Works (copper beechleaf bookmark at p. 5) ...
     The Child's Guide (blue cloth) ...

The Child's Guide to Knowledge was one of the great unsung bestsellers of the Victorian era. The copy below is from the 46th edition of 1872. As you can see from the pages, its format is of no slight interest for this chapter.

     How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?
     Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.

     What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?
     The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells in the church of Saint George. (656)

The contents of these pages are © 2004, Tony Thwaites, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia 4072

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