88 (U140.740) What will I take now?

Cast 88. Page 140, line 740.

　What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?

　—Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

　—Hello, Flynn.

　—How’s things?

　—Tiptop... Let me see. I’ll take a glass of burgundy and... let me see.

　Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there.

Episode 8. Around one o’clock in the afternoon. Bloom has just entered Davy Byrne’s pub to get a light lunch.

A customer already there, Nosey Flynn, speaks to him. “Nosey,” derived from “nose,” means nosy, prying, inquisitive — Flynn’s nickname.

“Nook” means a corner, a tucked-away place, somewhere out of sight. “said from his nook” is a wonderfully efficient phrase. It perfectly suggests that he was settled into his usual hidden corner where Bloom had not noticed him. Bloom probably was not delighted.

It is odd that Bloom looks at his pocket watch while deciding what to order. Later, while Bloom is in the lavatory, Flynn tells the proprietor that Bloom always does this whenever he is invited to drink. He says Bloom always pulls out his watch before deciding what to imbibe.

　—God Almighty couldn’t make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips off when the fun gets too hot. Didn’t you see him look at his watch? Ah, you weren’t there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he does.
　—There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He’s a safe man, I’d say. 

（U146.979）

Reading that exchange, one gets the impression that Bloom is a man who does not get drunk and who is cautious by nature. Perhaps he chooses his drink by calculating how long it will take him to sober up in light of what he has to do later in the day. He has already attended a funeral in the morning and done some advertising work at the newspaper office, but he does not really have any urgent business for the afternoon, so there seems little practical need for such calculation. Or perhaps he likes to give the impression of being a man with important engagements.

Bloom says “Let me see” over and over. It seems to be one of his habitual phrases. He is really hesitating.

Later in the evening, at the Ormond Hotel, he orders cider, and at that moment too he keeps saying “Let me see.” This is one of those small details that make the novel feel extraordinary.

And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now. How warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts (is it?) heat. Let me see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.

 （U220.445-）

A shandygaff is a beer-based mixed drink, made with ginger ale. The origin of the name is apparently uncertain.

He abandons the idea of the shandygaff and instead drinks burgundy — that is, Burgundy wine.

It is interesting to think about what Bloom drinks over the course of the day.

• Breakfast at home: tea
• Lunch here: Burgundy wine
• Evening at the Ormond Hotel: cider
• Later, after the maternity hospital, at Burke’s: ginger cordial
• At home: cocoa

Unlike many of the other male characters, he does not drink beer or whiskey. He does drink alcohol but prefers beverages of relatively low strength. He drinks tea, probably in part because of Molly. His wine is not claret (the Bordeaux wine favoured by the English) but Burgundy. Cider comes from traditions associated with Brittany and Normandy in France. His tastes are un-English, un-masculine by conventional standards, and rather health conscious.

“Tiptop” literally means the very top, but colloquially means excellent, first-rate. I am not sure whether it is still current. In this novel it is used by people other than Bloom, so it does not seem to be a personal catchphrase of his.
(U214.196)　(U291.324)

I am not entirely sure what “Almost taste them by looking” means in relation to the sardines.

A little earlier, Bloom thinks of tinned salmon as being like a mortuary chapel. So perhaps he simply does not care for fish. I took it to mean that merely looking at them is enough to put him off.

Provost’s house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn’t live in it if they paid me. Hope they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.

（U135.496）

“Ham” is also the name of one of Noah’s three sons in the Book of Genesis, alongside Shem and Japheth, each of whom became the ancestor of peoples spread across the world.

“Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there” is a pun on the sandwich ingredients ham, mustard, and bread. “Musterred” echoes “mustard,” and “bred” echoes “bread.” It is so neat that Bloom probably did not invent it himself; it was perhaps a familiar joke of the time. 

In the end, however, he orders a gorgonzola sandwich.

Davy Byrne’s gorgonzola sandwich

Davy Byrnes -Facebook

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87 (U373.773) SECOND WATCH: (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.)

Cast 87. Page 373, line 773.

　SECOND WATCH: (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.) You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.

　BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain’s fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift.

Episode 15. Just after midnight. Bloom has followed the drunken Stephen and Lynch into the red-light district. They are around the point where Mabbot Street meets Mecklenburg Street, a little after the passage discussed in Cast 25.

Bloom is suspected of feeding ham and mutton to a dog, and is questioned by two members of the watch. Episode 15 shifts constantly between reality and hallucination, and at this point turns into a courtroom scene in which various charges are brought against him.

What exactly is the “watch”? The novel also contains “constables” (as mentioned in Cast 57), but the watch and the constables are clearly not the same thing.

Based on material from  Police History.com , the outline seems to be roughly this.

• Before the eighteenth century, Dublin’s policing system was extremely weak.
• There was no effective police presence by day, and at night patrols were carried out by the inefficient watch.
• The watch was appointed by each parish and supervised by constables nominated by the churchwardens and parishioners.
• Under an act passed in 1715, Dublin Corporation (the old name of the city government, not a company) was given the power to appoint the watch. The constables stood above them in the chain of command.
• In 1777, the inhabitants of each parish were empowered to elect between six and twelve men to form a wardmote court, and that court in turn selected the constables and the watch.
• After that the police system was gradually reorganised.
• Under legislation passed in 1836, Dublin policing was reformed along lines similar to the reorganisation of the Metropolitan Police carried out by Sir Robert Peel in London in 1829. The new force was placed under the authority of the Chief Secretary for Ireland. This seems to be the Dublin Metropolitan Police mentioned in Cast 33. Constables and the watch were absorbed into this newer police structure.

      A Limerick City Night Watch inspector, c. 1910.

The repeated “I am” in Bloom’s speech conveys his agitation and fluster.

“Mare’s nest” means something that does not exist, and so it came to mean a supposed discovery that turns out to be nothing, a false alarm, a fabrication, a misunderstanding, a rumour.

Molly’s father Tweedy is referred to elsewhere in the novel as “Major Brian Cooper Tweedy,” so he is probably not a major general at all, but a major.

The Zulu War was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom in southern Africa. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift was one of the engagements in that war. Around 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors attacked the British garrison entrenched at the former mission station at Rorke’s Drift, but despite being heavily outnumbered, the defenders held out for two days, and when British reinforcements arrived the Zulu forces withdrew.

The Defence of Rorke’s Drift by Alphonse de Neuville

File:Défense de Rorke's Drift.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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86 (U63.240) A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx

 Cast 86: page 63, line 240.

A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it. And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame’s school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s. And Mr? He opened the letter within the newspaper.

　A flower. I think it’s a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not annoyed then? What does she say?

 praying cat

"Praying to Cat Mecca" by mikecogh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This is from Episode 5. Bloom has walked down Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, then south along Lime Street, west along Hanover Street, and south again to the post office (♦)at Westland Row Station, where he picks up the letter being held for him from his secret correspondent Martha. After that he doubles back along Lombard Street, turns from Great Brunswick Street into Cumberland Street, and arrives near Meade’s timberyard(★). He has slipped into a back lane so he can read the letter in secret. These are his thoughts.

Only now have I noticed that, for some reason, he takes a rather roundabout route to the post office.

1. Sill — windowsill or doorsill?

“Tabby” means a striped cat.

“Pity to disturb them” refers, I think, both to the children playing marbles on the ground and to the cat dozing in the warmth.

So what exactly is the “sill”?

Looking it up, it seems to mean the flat horizontal base at the bottom of either a window or a door.

a flat piece of wood, stone, etc. that forms the base of a window or door.

— Cambridge Dictionary

The lower part of a window is a windowsill; the lower part of a door is a doorsill. Cats usually sleep on windowsills, of course, but because the cat is being mentally paired with the children playing marbles outside, I am inclined to imagine a doorsill here.

2. Mohammed and the cat

Mohammed is said to have had a cat named Muezza. One day, when he was about to go out to prayer, he found Muezza asleep on the sleeve of the garment he intended to wear. Rather than wake the cat, he cut off the sleeve and went to prayer with one sleeve missing.

I tried to track down the source of this story, but it is not entirely straightforward. From what I could find, it may actually belong to  Ahmad al-Rifa'i, founder of the Rifaʿi order. It is said to appear in Siyar aʿlam al-nubalaʾ by Al-Dhahabi.

The anecdote runs roughly like this: one Friday, al-Rifaʿi woke to find it was already time for prayer, but a cat was asleep on his robe. He asked his wife for scissors, cut away the part of the robe under the cat, and went out to pray. When the cat later woke and wandered off, he asked for thread and had the robe sewn back together. Seeing that his wife was displeased, he told her not to worry: nothing had been lost, and only good had come of it.

In just two lines, Joyce gives us both Bloom’s kindness and his habit of storing away odd scraps of knowledge.

3. The marble game

What exactly are the children playing with when the text says “marbles”?

As toys, marbles in the nineteenth century were made from marble, ceramic, or clay. Mass production of clay marbles in the United States dates from the 1890s, and machine-made glass marbles appear in America in 1903. So for Dublin in 1904, I suspect the children are more likely to be playing with stone, ceramic, or clay marbles than with modern glass ones. 

Bloom, too, remembers playing marbles as a child. He attended a juvenile school run by Mrs Ellis.

　Why with satisfaction?

　Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs Ellis’s juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.

（U585.1495）

4. Where the flower goes

Bloom is just about to open Martha’s letter when he notices that a flower has been pinned to it. One of the pleasures of Ulysses is that tracing the movements of Bloom’s small possessions can be almost as satisfying as tracing the movements of the characters themselves. So let me follow the route of the letter and the flower.

Episode 5

Bloom receives Martha’s letter at the post office and puts it into his “sidepocket,” presumably the side pocket of his coat. （U59.65）

As he walks, he opens the envelope inside the pocket, takes out the letter, and crushes the envelope into a little ball.

Something is pinned to the letter. （U59.76–）

On Brunswick Street, he takes the letter from his pocket and slips it inside the newspaper he is carrying, The Freeman’s Journal, which he must have bought somewhere earlier in the episode. （U93.221）

At Meade’s timberyard, he opens the letter wrapped in the newspaper and reads it. This is the present passage.

After reading it, he removes the flower that has been pinned to the letter and places it in his “heartpocket,” presumably the breast pocket of his coat. （U64.260–） The letter goes back into the side pocket. （U64.267）

He fingers the letter again in his side pocket, pulls out the pin, and throws it away into the street. （U64.275–）

After that, the flower remains for a long time in Bloom’s breast pocket, while the letter stays in the side pocket.

Episode 15

In Nighttown, on Mecklenburg Street, when he is questioned by the nightwatch, Bloom takes the flower out of his breast pocket. （U372.738）

Episode 17

The letter from Martha, which has remained in the side pocket all this time, is finally put away by Bloom after he gets home, into a locked drawer of the sideboard. （U593.1840–）

The flower was probably enclosed because Bloom is corresponding under the pseudonym Henry Flower.

The novel never tells us what finally becomes of the flower.

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85 (638.1356) Im sure hes very distinguished

Cast 85: page 638, line 1356.

Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that

This is from Episode 18. The final episode is Molly Bloom’s interior monologue: a vast unpunctuated flow of words, divided into eight enormous sentences. This passage comes near the end of the seventh.

Here Molly is thinking about Stephen, the novel’s other central figure. Bloom brought Stephen home with him earlier that night. Stephen has already left, and Molly never actually meets him, but in Episode 17 Bloom has told her about him in bed.

Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?

Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.

（U605.2269）

Margate is a seaside resort town on the northeastern edge of Kent, in England.

As for resorts in Britain, they almost always meant waterside resorts. These came in two forms: inland spas and seaside bathing resorts. During the Industrial Revolution, the character of the resort changed dramatically in Britain. One major shift was that popularity turned, almost as if the table had rotated, from spas to seaside bathing places.

(Akio Kawashima, “Resort Cities and Leisure,” in The Back Alleys of the British Empire, Heibonsha Library, 2022)

The first modern seaside resort in the world to emerge in this way was Brighton. Margate was one of the many seaside resort towns that followed. Saint Anne’s-on-Sea, which appeared in Cast 76, was another.

After the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, aristocrats and royals who had spent time exiled in England returned to France, bringing back with them the new habits and customs they had learned there. (Shigeru Kashima, “The Birth of the Seaside Resort,” in The Back Alleys of the British Empire, Chuko Bunko, 2003.) That is said to have been the beginning of the French seaside resort, the world that later becomes the setting of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in Proust.

Margate is mentioned several times in Ulysses.

In Episode 8, after lunch, Bloom fantasizes about taking Molly on a trip to English seaside resorts such as Brighton and Margate.

Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls.

（U148.1065）

In Episode 16, Bloom sees a postcard shown to him by a sailor and begins to fantasize again about future travel. This seems like an extension of the earlier daydream. Margate is one of the places he imagines.

Another thing just struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts, Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative.

（U512.519）

A spa, in the strict sense, is an inland resort based around mineral or thermal waters, like Bath, and I do not think Margate belongs to that category. So this is probably one of the characteristic “wrong details” of Episode 16.

Bloom does not sound as though he himself has ever been to Margate. So perhaps Molly visited it with someone before her marriage. Bloom, not knowing that, later fantasizes about taking her there himself. And then, only here, we realize it. That may be one of the small hidden mechanisms of the novel.

 Margate Jetty.

"The jetty, Margate, Kent, England, ca. 1897" by trialsanderrors is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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84 (U6.139) —Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

Cast 84: page 6, line 139.

　—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

　Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

　—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

This is from Episode 1, the opening scene of the novel. It is eight in the morning. Stephen, the protagonist, is living in the Martello tower with his friend Malachi Mulligan. Mulligan has just held out to Stephen the mirror he was using to shave.

“cleft by a crooked crack” has that striking alliteration of c’s.

A little later in the same episode, ”cracked lookingglass of a servant” appears again. Stephen tells Mulligan that “cracked lookingglass of a servant” is a symbol of Irish art. Ireland, as a servant to England, is a damaged mirror and cannot reflect reality truly.

—Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman.

（U6.154）

　—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

（U14.484）

Because this is a mirror, it also made me think of the passage I wrote about in Cast 59: the “mocking mirror” held up by Averroes and Maimonides. (Only now did I notice the play on looking glass.) I wondered there whether it might be some kind of curved mirror. A flat mirror shows only a fragment of the world, but a cracked mirror or a warped mirror can reflect a wider and stranger one. Joyce may be trying to capture the world by means of a broken mirror. At a deeper level, “the cracked lookingglass of a servant” may describe his own novel.

“dogsbody” means a drudge, someone stuck with the dirty work nobody else wants to do.

A little earlier, Mulligan has called Stephen exactly that, so the word rises again in Stephen’s mind here.

　Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

　—Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

（U5.112）

Dogs become important again in Episode 3. On Sandymount Strand, Stephen sees the carcass of a dog. The word “dogsbody” comes back there too.

The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

（U39.351）

“rid of vermin” means getting rid of pests or vermin.

“Lead him not into temptation” is, of course, a parody of Matthew 6:13.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:

And Ursula, the servant’s name, is presumably a reference to Saint Ursula, the legendary British Christian virgin and martyr, famed for beauty, purity, and noble birth. Mulligan is clearly making fun of the lofty name.

The painting below is Hans Memling’s Saint Ursula, in the Memling Museum in Bruges.

File:Saint Ursula of Cologne, by Hans Memling.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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83 (U548.148) What did Stephen see on raising his gaze

Cast 83. Page 548, line 148.

　What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

　Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

This is from Episode 17. The whole of Episode 17 is written in the form of questions and answers. It is after two o’clock in the morning. Bloom has brought Stephen back to his house, and in the basement kitchen he is trying to boil water on the stove so he can offer him some cocoa.

This is the point where Stephen notices the laundry hanging above the stove.

“Housebells” are the bells by which people on the upper floors could summon servants in the basement. They were connected to the rooms by cords, so that when someone pulled the cord upstairs, a spring-loaded bell downstairs would ring. Since there are five bells, that would suggest that there are five rooms in Bloom’s house from which a servant could be called.

File:Staff Call Bells (7964118810).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The Bloom family is imagined as living at No. 7 Eccles Street. The houses on Eccles Street were of the late eighteenth-century Georgian type. A good sense of what such buildings looked like can be seen on the website of the Georgian House Museum, The Number Twenty Nine house on Dublin’s Lower Fitzwilliam Street. Bloom’s house would not have been as grand as that one, of course.

I am not entirely sure about “the chimney pier.” Pier usually means a quay or jetty, but it can also mean a square supporting pillar, so I take it here to mean the boxed-in vertical structure that encloses the chimney rising up from the stove.

It seems that a line has been strung from the recessed space between the side of that structure and the wall, across toward the opposite wall, and that the washing is hanging there.

The four handkerchiefs, since they are described as rectangles, were probably folded in half and hung horizontally over the line.

“Hose” can mean stockings or socks. It has no ordinary plural in this sense, so one pair of hose means one pair. Judging from period advertisements for hose worn with suspenders, these were probably not joined together like tights.

These are hanging “in their habitual position,” that is, with the suspender tops at the top and the feet hanging downward, clipped with one peg where the two stockings overlap in the middle and one peg at each outer end.

I cannot help suspecting that Joyce intended some sexual suggestion in the phrase “three erect wooden pegs.”

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82 (U118.880) ーThat is oratory, the professor said

Cast 82. Page 118, line 880.

　ーThat is oratory, the professor said, uncontradicted.

　Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.

　I have money.

　ーGentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I suggest that the house do now adjourn?”

 

This is from Episode 7, in the newspaper office. J. J. O’Molloy, Professor MacHugh, Stephen, and others are talking. Professor MacHugh has just quoted a speech by the orator and barrister John F. Taylor. What follows is Stephen’s inward response.

In Taylor’s speech, an Egyptian high priest rebukes the Jewish Moses. The point is clearly allegorical: Egypt stands for Britain, and the Jews for Ireland.

Stephen imagines Taylor’s speech transposed into the landscape of ancient Ireland.

“Gone with the wind” is of course famous as the title of the novel by Margaret Mitchell (published in 1936), and even more through the 1939 film.

But since Ulysses was published in 1922, Mitchell’s novel cannot be relevant here. Her title itself was taken from a line in the poem Cynara by the nineteenth-century English poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), and that may well be what Joyce had in mind.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The Hill of Tara was the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Mullaghmast was likewise associated with royal or ceremonial gatherings in early Irish history.

It is also an extraordinary coincidence that Tara is the name of the plantation in Gone with the Wind, owned by the O’Hara family, Irish immigrants living near Atlanta. Yet here in Ulysses, Tara appears for wholly Irish reasons.

I was not sure at first about hosts, but dictionary definitions include “a vast multitude,” which fits perfectly here.

“Miles of ears of porches” comes from Hamlet. It echoes the famous speech in Act I, Scene 5, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father describes how Claudius murdered him by pouring poison into his ear.

Brief let me be. Sleeping within mine orchard,
My custom always in the afternoon
Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole
With juice of cursèd hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leperous distillment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,

The ear is imagined as the porch or entranceway of a house. Here Stephen seems to picture long rows of listeners’ ears opening themselves to the orator’s voice.

A little earlier in the chapter, Stephen had already recalled this same phrase in connection with a murder case involving brothers, and that earlier echo leads into the present passage.

　J. J. O’Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:

　ーOne of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.

　And in the porches of mine ear did pour.

（U114.750）

“Scatter … to the four winds” means to scatter in every direction.

The phrase apparently comes from Jeremiah 49:36 in the Old Testament:

And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven, and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.

So the “four winds” also connect back to the opening phrase, “Gone with the wind.”

The “Akasic records” refer to the idea of a cosmic memory in which every event, thought, and emotion since the birth of the universe is somehow recorded.

The term is associated either with Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), founder of the Theosophical Society, or with Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who later developed Anthroposophy. Spiritualism and theosophy were very much in vogue in the world of the novel, that is, in 1904.

And again, just a little earlier in the chapter, J. J. O’Molloy had asked Stephen what he thought of the Blavatsky circle, so this too is part of the chain of association in Stephen’s mind.

　ーprofessor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it. She was a nice old bag of tricks.

（U115.782）

Stephen has money because he was paid this morning by Mr Deasy, the schoolmaster.

He seems, at least here, impatient with Irish nationalist rhetoric. So he declares the meeting adjourned and proposes they all move on to the pub.

Sunset of the Hill of Tara

File:Sunset-hill-of-tara.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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