“DANTE AND THE LOBSTER”, It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first canti of the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him [... 9]. He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of his mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which it gradually did. [10]. For the tiller of the field the thing was simple, he had it from his mother. The spots were Cain with his truss of thorns, dispossessed, cursed from the earth, fugitive and vagabond. The moon was that countenance fallen and branded, seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly. It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him. [11]. The rather handsome face of McCabe stared up at him [...] Now the barrel-loaf came out of its biscuit-tin and had its end evened off on the face of McCabe [10; [.../...] the Malahide murderer’s petition for mercy, signed by half the land, having been rejected, the man must swing at dawn in Mountjoy and nothing could save him. Ellis the hangman was even now on his way. Belacqua, tearing at the sandwich and swilling his precious stout, pondered on McCabe in his cell. [15 ...] Why not mercy and piety both, even down below? Why not mercy and Godliness together? A little mercy in the stress of sacrifice, a little mercy to rejoice against judgement. He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn. What was he doing now, how was he feeling? He would relish one more meal, one more night. [18]. ‘in the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. it had to. Take into the air my quiet breath. / Belaqua looked at the old parchment of her face, grey in the dim kitchen. / “You make a fuss”, she said angrily, “and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner”/ / She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. / Well, thought Belaqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all. / It is not.’ [21] (For longer extracs, see infra.)

“FINGAL”: Belacqua & Winnie - a very sad animal [23] a sad animal again [26]. They considered Fingal for some time together in silence. Its coast eaten away with creeks and marshes, tesserae of small fields, patches of wood springing up like a weed, the line of hills too low and close to view. [24]. disimproved [11] misremembered [26]. his feet in ruins [13] ruined voice [16] the high ruin [23] the lovely ruins [27] abstract the asylum and there was little left in Portrane but ruins [28] what the ruins are [30]. Belacqua asked if the tower was an old one, as though it required a Dr Petrie to see that it was not. [26]. His mind subside [9] He had allowed himself to get run down, but he scoffed at the idea of a sequitur from his mind to his body. [28] nature outside me compensating for nature inside me. [28]. Surely it is in such little adjustments that the benevolence of the first cause appears beyond dispute [30]. Descriptions, there was nothing at all noteworthy about his appearance [26] Winnie still sees, as vividly as when they met her anxious gaze for the first time, his great purple face and white moustaches [30] a brief satirical description of Belacqua’s person (given by Sholto, not repeated here) [31]; little fat Presto (Swift) [31]; enlivened the last phase of his solipsism before he toed the line and began to relish the world with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place [...] it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another [...] being by nature however sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence... he was at times tempted to wonder whether the remedy were not rather more disagreeable than the complaint [...] boomerang, out and back [...] his contrivance did not proceed from and discrimination [35] between points in space [...; 36]. I know all this because we were Pylades and Orestes for a period, flattened down into something very genteel [...] He lived a Beethoven pause, whatever he meant by that [...] He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious [...] ‘moving pauses’ [...] a strong weakness for oxymoron [...] Exempt from destinations, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that [36] are liable to crop up [37].

“DING-DONG”: Emerging [...] from the underground convenience in the maw of College St. [...] Tommy Moore’s plinth [...] loll against the plinth of this bullnecked bard and wait a sign [...] signs on all hands [...] big Bovril sign to start with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith, hope and - what was it - Love, Eden missed, every ebb derided, all tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus, little me [...] What he would not give now to get on the move again! Away from ideas! [37]. ACCOUNT OF PEARSE ST. - most pleasant, despite its name, to be abroad in, full it as always was with shabby substance of coming a going [38] DESCRIPTION OF THE PUB: a great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of counter and waxing [...] the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebreity [...] where [...] all the wearisome tactics of egress and dud Beethoven would be done away with [...] ... the old itch and algos crept back into his mind [41]. DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN: her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a gentlewoman of the people. Her gown had served its time, but yet contrived to be respectable. He noticed with a pang that she sported about her neck the insidious little mock fur so prevalent in tony slumland [...] She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might be passed middle age. But her face, ah her face [...] [was] brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering [...] [all this in ‘sweet style’; 41]. unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville [42]. the fitness of Moore’s bull neck, not a whit too short, with all due respect to the critics [...] Tommy Moore with his head on his shoulders [47].

“A WET NIGHT”: Doubt, Despair, and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these? Christian scrounging [47; [...] then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the theatre and the long line of poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. [...] the Fire Station opposite which seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In deference to Savonarola? Ha! ha! [48]. The Frica, ‘briefless martyress in rut’; Alba; P.B. [Polar Bear]. the homespun Poet and his little saprophile, an anonymous politico-ploughboy [50]. shabby hero [70]. When with indifference I remember my past sorrow, my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow. The mind, upon the indifference which is in it, is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow which is in it, is not sad [73]. But the wind had dropped, as it so often does in Dublin when all the respectable men and women whom it delights to annoy have gone to bed, and the rain fell in a uniform untroubled manner. It fell upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably upon the Central Bog it well with a rather desolate uniformity [75; after Joyce?]

“LOVE AND LETHE”, ‘Reader, a gloria is coffee laced with brandy [...] We know something of Belacqua, but Ruby tough is a stranger to these pages. Anxious that those who read this incredible adventure shall not pooh-pooh it as unintelligible we avail ourselves now of this lull, what time Belacqua is on his way. [80]. Perugino Pièta in National Gallery [see ftn. on ‘glittering vitrine’ preventing total statement] [81].

“WALKING OUT”: ‘After that [i.e., Kerry Blue bitch uriniates over the tramps leg] further comment was impossible. The question of apology or compensation simply did not arise. The insitinctive nobility of this spendid creature for whom private life, his joys and chagrins at evening under the cart, was not acquired, as Belacqua one day if he were lucky might acquire his, antecedent, disarmed of all the pot-hooks and hangers of utility. Belacqua made an articulate flourish with his stick and passed down the road out of the life of this tinker, this real man at last’ [95].

“WHAT A MISFORTUNE”: ‘This impersonal pity ws damned in many quarters as an intolerable supererogation, and in some few as a postive sin against God and Society. But Belacqua could not help it, for he was alive to no other kind than this: final, uniform and continuous, unaffected by circumstance, assigned without discrimination to all the undead without works. The public, taking cognisance of it only as callousness in respect of this or that wretched individual, had no use for it [...; 1974 edn. p.105.]’

[ The stories continue with “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux”, “Yellow” ( ‘Down to the theatre! Was there a conspiracy in this place todestroy him body and soul? His tongue clave to his palate. They desiccated his secretions. First blood to the profession!’; 155) and “Draff”; END.]