me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with
a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten
forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then
you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.
The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to
hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised
that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first
and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and
objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be
a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love
him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._

Are you condemned to do this?

--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I th