The Bloom

A Bloomsday Meditation
June 16, 1904 / June 16, 2026

Words, Words, Words

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

- The opening

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

- Stephen, "Nestor"

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

- Stephen, "Proteus"

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

- "Calypso"

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

- Stephen, "Scylla and Charybdis"

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

- "Scylla and Charybdis"

Love loves to love love.

- "Cyclops"

Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

- Bloom, "Cyclops"

What?

Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

- "Cyclops"

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

- "Nausicaa"

What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

- "Scylla and Charybdis"

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

- Molly, "Penelope" (the final words)

On Writing Ulysses

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

- James Joyce
and yes I said yes I will Yes.