And which did he consider the best chapter?
The one with the questions and the answers, for many reasons, not the least being passages of awe-inspiring beauty such as this:
Quote:
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellation?
Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster : of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee : of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth : of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet : of Arcturus : of the precession of equinoxes : of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained : of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901 : of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules : of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threscore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?
Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth : of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa : of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single [p.652] pinhead : of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.
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The chapter also contains practical advice that changed my life:
Quote:
What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard : a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather : a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours : quiet reflections upon the course of the day : a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman’s double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.
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