The Lotus-eaters

In the story he tells to the Phaeacians, Odysseus recounts his visit to the land of the Lotus-eaters. As translated by Robert Fagles:

Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever.

As Bloom wanders about Dublin his thoughts make the rounds of the idle pleasures that fill up our lives, that palliate and distract us: the opposite sex, the theater, alcohol, religion, medicine, sport. There is an idle, dreamlike quality to the prose, and at one point Bloom imagines scenes of the far East:

Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flower meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far neinte. Not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feels most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt.

But we see the dangers of idle pleasures in the form of two horses with their feed bags on:

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. To full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look. Still the neigh can be very irritating.

It cracks me up that a paragraph that starts out with poetry like "a crunching of gilded oats" and "the sweet oaten reek" ends with "Still the neigh can be very irritating." The episode finishes with some more high-and-low poetry, again on the theme of idleness, ease and the sensual. Bloom imagines himself in the bath he's about to take:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Also in the episode we see hints and glimpses of Bloom's past and present, many of which we won't fully understand until later. When writing about the book there's a temptation to reel off all the little thoughts, occurrences, clues and allusions; one almost feels obligated to, since so much of it is encoded in the text and must be teased out and explicated. These little puzzles are not what makes Joyce worth reading, though, and I think it's a mistake to get too caught up in trying to figure out which shop is on which street and who was M'Intosh.