“
For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Talos), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.
If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.

- Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, Restored Edition, (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2001), 434.

From Ulysses:

In what posture?

Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild in the womb.

Womb? Weary?

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailor and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

When?

Going to bed there was a square round Sindbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

●

(17.2311-2332)

“
We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.
Be brave! Let us remain aware of our task and not grumble, a solution will come, God has never deserted our people. Right through the ages there have been Jews, through all the ages they have had to suffer, but it has made them strong too; the weak fall, but the strong will remain and never go under!

 - Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, trans. B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952), 221-2.

From Ulysses:

“—And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.  Also now.  This very moment.  This very instant.

Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.

—Robbed, says he.  Plundered.  Insulted.  Persecuted.  Taking what belongs to us by right.  At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.

—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen

—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.” (12.1467-1474)

“
She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (New York: Collier Books, 1986), 120.

From Ulysses:

“On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” (2.448-9)

“If he had smiled why would he have smiled?

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of  a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.” (17.2126-2131)

“
Each year the French government refuses about one-third of the applicants for admission, and some of those refusals were of candidates who met the formal conditions for naturalization. The candidate must show “good morals” but they can also be rejected on the grounds of insufficient assimilation, whether in their dress, their language, their travel outside the country, or the position they have taken on Islam. The police verify whether a candidate for naturalization has assimilated, and in their inquiry sometimes ask about private habits. One lawyer from Morocco was asked how many times a week she ate couscous, how often she traveled to Morocco, of what nationality her friends were, and which newspapers she read. A Tunisian was asked why he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca twice.

- John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 196.

From Ulysses: 

-But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

-Yes, says Bloom.

-What is it? says John Wyse.

-A nation? says Bloom.  A nation is the same people living in the same place.

-By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

-Or also living in different places.

-That covers my case, says Joe.

-What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.

-Ireland, says Bloom.  I was born here.  Ireland. (12.1419-1431)

“You have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.” (1.209)

“
Me sentí infinitamente pequeño en el centro de aquel ombligo de piedra; ombligo de un mundo deshabitado, orgulloso y eminente, al que de algún modo yo pertenecía. Sentí que mis propias manos habían trabajado allí en alguna etapa lejana, cavando surcos, alisando peñascos. Me sentí chileno, peruano, americano.” - Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido, 220.

A rough translation by yours truly of Neruda’s reasons behind writing Alturas de Macchu Picchu:

“I felt infinitely small in the middle of that navel of rock; the navel of an abandoned world, proud and eminent, to which in some way I belonged.  I felt as if in some distant stage of my life my own hands had worked there, plowing, leveling stones.  I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American.”

From Ulysses:

“What has she in the bag?  A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool.  The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh.  That is why mystic monks.  Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos.” (3.36-38)

Also from Proteus:

“Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf.  Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold.  A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows.  Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat.  Famine, plague and slaughters.  Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves.  I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires.” (3.300-308)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Stephen, more than any of us, mediates the world through language.

From Portrait:

“Words which he did not understand he said over and over himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him.” (62)

Also from Portrait: when he sleeps with the prostitute, she deflowers not just him, but the language center of his brain.

“He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips.  They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.” (101)

Bloom’s great struggle throughout Ulysses is to deal with his feelings of loneliness as he is made cuckhold by Molly and Boyland.  Throughout the novel he is alone: the lone Jew, the only one not drinking at the bar in “Cyclops,” the only middle-aged man in “Oxens,” the sole male in his family after Rudy’s death, and like all of us, he is alone in his own mind.  But by far the greatest loneliness he feels is that of being distanced from Molly.  He keeps trying to stave off his loneliness by reaching out to others; he writes to Martha, he imagines the feelings of all the single men in “Sirens,” he has a voyeuristic one-off with Gertie in “Nausicaa,” and he tries to pseudo-adopt Stephen.  But of course he is human, and so he is left alone with his thoughts.

Like the poet at the beginning of the video, if you’re not okay with being alone, if you’re not truly within yourself, it’s heartbreakingly difficult.  At the end of “Nausicaa,” when the “Ba”-bat of Bloom’s soul is flying around outside of him, he thinks:

“All quiet on Howth now.  The distant hills seem.  Where we.  The rhododendrons.  I am a fool perhaps.  He gets the plums, and I the plumstones.  Where I come in.  All that old hill has seen.  Names change: that’s all.  Lovers: yum yum.” (13.1097-1100)

He’s only focusing on the fact that he’s alone, only thinking about others instead of himself.

Bloom never does learn how to be content with complete solitude, but he does achieve peace with always being within his own mind.  For he realizes that he is never truly alone.  He is the only one to whom Molly has said “yes,” and his section of the book ends with them lying in a figure eight, two separate bodies and two separate minds that are still inextricably linked:

“At rest relatively to themselves and to each other.  In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.” (17.2307-10)

“
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness.”
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (1.1.76-9)

This technically reminds me more of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than of Ulysses, but the issue of religious purity vs. quotidian happiness is something Stephen continues to struggle with throughout Ulysses, and something Bloom has no trouble with whatsoever.  From Portrait:

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” (172)

Oh, and that page number refers to the August 1967 Viking Compass printing of Portrait.  The Shakespeare citation refers to the Arden edition of Midsummer.