r to
the former.

What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,
declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place
the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal
instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate
a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues,
places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in
the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and
E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare
street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a
public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two
or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line
drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in
different places).

What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually
selfexcluding propositions?

The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert
Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive
particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring
to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had
publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his
(the clown's) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the
summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches
on the milled edge and tendered it m payment of an account due to and
received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand
Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible,
circuitous or direct, return.

Was the clown Bloom's son?

No.

Had Bloom's coin returned?

Never.

Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to
amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and
international animosity. He believed then that human life was infinitely
perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct
from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of
destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of
the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and
death: