Having my way with Ulysses

Quicker, darlint! On now. Dare it. Let there be life.

12:56 pm

He didn’t see it.   He suggested I name it It is a God who Gave us this Peace.  People always quote the first page.  Doesn’t anybody read on?  Tityrus worships Rome with his speech to his exiled friend; that’s the god he means.  Early Virgil, still a masterpiece, but it doesn’t work for the story as I told it.  I named it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums.  You get it.  The elements compound and compound and that’s where to find the story.  Accretion.  What do you want to read?  Over and again it is: once upon a time and every day until one day and because of this and because of this until finally and ever since that day.  Excretion!  If that’s the story you want to consume then open wide, we’ll spoon it right in.  Here’s the airplane coming in for a landing.  I talked about two vestals aged 50 and 53 out for the day.  You could see them.  Midwives.  I filled it and filled it.  You could even smell them.  Childless and condemned to be so forevermore.  Carrying with them a misbirth with a trailing navelcord.  Planting their plum stones per second per second onto concrete.  Too tired to see the view.  Too tired to look up or down or speak and spent their savings to get there.  See them?  They’ll be sore tomorrow.  And for their aches they use Lourdes water.  What more than what I? What else could I?  And I think it’s funny.  Even if it did remind me of that time with the alley girl.  Crawford didn’t realize I was done either.  And Professor MacHugh didn’t see it.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll include it in a short story collection.

The Gods themselves are simply agents of a great high mystery, the secret of which is found in mathematics.

Before a thousand years have passed -- a span that, for eternity, is less space than an eyeblink for the slowest sphere in heaven -- would you find greater glory if you left your flesh when it was old than if your death had come before your infant words were spent? 9:24 am

Milly is fifteen but I remember like yesterday calling the midwife when she was born.  She was the same one.  She knew instantly Rudy wouldn’t live.  God is good she said and she knew better.  He lived eleven days.  He’d be eleven now.  If I could overreach, into this now or out of this now.  Oh it is a difference of all enormity.  I was so proud.  I’d give my every eyeblink.  She knew at once.  She knew.  From the first.