Among the many parallels between Stephen’s first three
chapters and Bloom’s first three is the similar way in which
the two men's moods respond physically to the presence or
absence of sunlight. The warm
light that greets Stephen on the first page of Telemachus,
and Bloom when he leaves his home in pursuit of meat,
disappears several pages later when a cloud obscures the
sun––an adumbration of the dramatic thunderstorm that will
visit Dublin later in the day. The dark chill in the
atmosphere produces a similar depressive effect in both men,
and when the sun returns several minutes later their moods
brighten.
Nearly seven pages into Telemachus (248 lines into
Gabler’s lineated edition), “A cloud began to cover
the sun slowly, shadowing the bay behind him in deeper
green.” A little more than six pages into Calypso
(218 lines in Gabler), “A cloud began to cover the
sun, slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” Given the distance
between the two men (between five and ten miles), they cannot
be seeing the same eclipse at precisely the same instant. But
given the close locations of these passages in each episode,
it seems likely that they are seeing the same eclipse at very
nearly the same instant.
The sense of simultaneity is reinforced by what happens
next. Some forty lines after a cloud begins to obscure the sun
in Telemachus, Stephen “heard warm running
sunlight” on the morning air. Some
twenty-five lines after the cloud begins to cover the sun in Calypso,
“Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road,
swiftly in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath”
to greet Bloom.
In both cases, the sun's reappearance coincides with a move
away from depressing thoughts. Stephen's gloomy memories of
his mother's dying, and the nightmarish dream in which her
ghost visited him, give way to Mulligan's cheerful call to
breakfast and the thought of being paid today. Bloom's
reflection that Palestine is not a utopia but a grey
wasteland, and the Jewish people an old exhausted race, gives
way to thoughts of breakfast with Molly.
The corporeal basis of these shifting moods is made
especially evident in Bloom's case: "Dead: an old woman's: the
grey sunken cunt of the world. / Desolation. / Grey
horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his
pocket he turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward.
Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age
crusting him with a salt cloak. . . . To smell the
gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near
her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes."
Much later in the book, in Ithaca, the reader
learns at last that the two men were indeed seeing the same
cloud at roughly the same time: Stephen attributes his
collapse in Circe to "the reapparition of a
matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points
of observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at first no
bigger than a woman's hand."
