Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

Page 37 has been posted.

This is the start of Chapter 3, sometimes called Proteus, named after the creature that Menelaus struggled with when he was marooned near Egypt on his way home from Troy.

Proteus was a sea god (by some accounts second only to Poseidon, and by other accounts as a more ancient god) that could shift its shape at will.

It's an appropriate image for this chapter because, like Proteus, the words following the shifting thoughts of Stephen's "stream of consciousness" as he wanders the beach outside Dublin.

This is an especially "difficult" chapter, and I've hardly made a dent in annotating it. Where to start?

On my first approach, I tried to decipher "Ineluctable modality of the visible." But it's too tightly bound to the rest of the page to make much sense on its own.

My second approach was to start by translating all the foreign phrases. But I got bogged down by parsing the difference between "nacheinander" and "nebeneinander."

In both approaches, it seems like the reader is thrown in the middle of a philosophical arguement that Stephen is having with himself. Some people might be clued into the various points of view, but I'm lost. It will take a good bit of extracurricular reading to understand this stuff better.

However, one name comes through clear: Aristotle. It's a name that has cropped up earlier in the book, but now Joyce seems to assume greater familiarity with the man's work. Ugh.

Any suggestions on which work of Aristotle's to start first? Could any of it be considered Summer Reading?

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy.