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Saturday 2 November 2019

Thursday, 31 October 2019, Episode 1 (1.177 - 1.522)

We read as far as "Are you coming, you fellows?" (1.522)

Summary:
Buck Mulligan who has noticed Stephen is brooding (1.235) over something wants to know the reason. He asks, "Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me?" (1.161) Stephen replies that when he had visited Mulligan the first time after his (Stephen's) mother had passed away, Mulligan had told his mother, who had asked who had come, "O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead." (1.198) This saying of Mulligan had deeply hurt Stephen as he had found it deeply offensive to himself. When Mulligan realises this, he gives up trying to cheer Stephen up, starts going down the stairs to prepare breakfast, after he tells Stephen, "Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?" (1.231)
Eventually Stephen follows Mulligan down to the kitchen carrying the bowl of lather that Mulligan had forgotten on the parapet of the tower. He remembers carrying a boat of incense at Clongowes (Stephen was a student there in The Portrait. Joyce too was a student of Clongowes Wood College.)
Breakfast is bread, butter, honey, fry and black tea. Black because the milk woman has not yet come. An old woman does appear soon bringing rich white milk (1.397). She reminds Stephen of the allegoric names given to Ireland: Silk of the kine [the most beautiful cattle] and poor old woman (1.403). Haines, the Englishman, starts to talk to her in Irish which she does not recognise. (I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows. 1.433) Haines brings up the subject of paying her. Mulligan after much searching his pockets produces a florin (a two-shilling coin). 
Meanwhile, Mulligan has praised Stephen in front of Haines, who is impressed by Stephen's sayings such as all Ireland is washed by the gulfstream (1.476), and wants to collect them if allowed. Mulligan has found out that it was pay day for Stephen. 
Breakfast is over, and the three young men decide to go for a swim in the sea.

One of the special features on these pages are the songs that Joyce has included. They are, (1) W. B. Yeats's Who goes with Fergus? (1.239), (2) A song from Turko the Terrible (1.260), (3) a coronation day song (1.300), and (4) For old Mary Ann, an anonymous Irish song (1.282).

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