—­Dedalus, you’re an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself.  I’m not.  I’m a democrat and I’ll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.

Eleven!  Then he was late for that lecture too.  What day of the week was it?  He stopped at a newsagent’s to read the headline of a placard.  Thursday.  Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to one, physics.  He fancied to himself the English lecture and felt, even at that distance, restless and helpless.  He saw the heads of his classmates meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points they were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential definitions and examples or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable and an unfavourable criticism side by side.  His own head was unbent for his thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class of students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellar-damp and decay.  Another head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fellows like the head of a priest appealing without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him.  Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the head and face?  Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head or death-mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown.  It was a priest-like face, priest-like in its palor, in the wide winged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the jaws, priest-like in the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly smiling; and Stephen, remembering swiftly how he had told Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend’s listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it.  But the nightshade of his friend’s listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and He found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language.  His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms: