Of a piece with the "heaventree of stars" in Ithaca
is another lyrical neologism, the "lonechill" that Bloom feels
after Stephen leaves his house. It too evokes a sky studded
with stars, but now the astronomical setting evokes alienation
and emptiness.
After all the animated conversation, after Stephen refuses
his offer to stay the night, after he shakes Bloom's hand and
strolls unconcernedly away down the lane, Bloom is left
standing by himself under the stars. Question: "Alone,
what did Bloom hear?" Answer: "The double reverberation of retreating
feet on the heavenborn earth, the double vibration of a
jew's harp in the resonant lane." More insistently: "Alone,
what did Bloom feel?" Answer: "The cold of interstellar
space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the
absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur." Yet
another question: "Of what did bellchime and handtouch and
footstep and lonechill remind him?" Answer: of six
"companions" now deceased. One of them, Percy Apjohn, was in
the list of late-night conversationalists who once kept him
company and whose absence promises a progressively greater loss of
human connectedness.
The narrative has stripped the heaventree of its lush beauty
by noting that human beings cannot survive its airless voids,
by consigning its captivating lights to a past from which they
once emerged eons ago, and by attributing to it a frigidity
past human imagining. As Stephen's feet tramp down "the
heavenborn earth" this cosmic sterility becomes infused also
with human loneliness. It is the coldest, darkest moment in
the novel.
