One of several forthcoming asides on the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce. Lead us not into temptation.
Currently involved in a very slow reading group of the masterpiece of modern literature, James Joyce‘s Ulysses.
This excerpt comes from Episode 5, The Lotus-Eaters, in which our hero Leopold Bloom (‘Poldy) is out of the house and upon the day, amidst errands. One is to get the mail from the post office (this has also just happened at home) where he receives a letter from Ms. Martha Clifford, who according to Stuart Gilbert (writer of James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study) was discovered through an advertisement for a typist ‘Poldy made (150).
So he reads the love note from Martha, part of a semi-romantic correspondence. Then:
He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then, walking here and there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don’t please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha’s perfume.
Ulysses, 76
Tell you a story: though in late 40s waited so long to read this book. What if I hadn’t before death read it? And how old is old ‘Poldy?
Waited because of this awe, this esteem in which I held the book. Stood proudly upon a pedestal where I could keep it. Though I had no sense of what this pedestal was and why it was to be there. But I knew from college days, perhaps even before that conversation I had about Don DeLillo’s Mao II.
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