The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and the lines filed out of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside his clothes.  He still tried to think what was the right answer.  Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother?  What did that mean, to kiss?  You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down.  That was to kiss.  His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise:  kiss.  Why did people do that with their two faces?

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six.  But the Christmas vacation was very far away:  but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.

There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography:  a big ball in the middle of clouds.  Fleming had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon.  That was like the two brushes in Dante’s press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush with the maroon velvet back for Michael Davitt.  But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours.  Fleming had done it himself.

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America.  Still they were all different places that had different names.  They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there:  himself, his name and where he was.

    Stephen Dedalus
    Class of Elements
    Clongowes Wood College
    Sallins
    County Kildare
    Ireland
    Europe
    The World
    The Universe

That was in his writing:  and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page: 

    Stephen Dedalus is my name,
    Ireland is my nation. 
    Clongowes is my dwellingplace
    And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.  Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name.  That was he:  and he read down the page again.  What was after the universe?

Nothing.  But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything.  It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.  Only God could do that.  He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God.  God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen.  Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying.  But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.