Lestrygonians

One in the afternoon and Bloom is hungry. He walks across the centre of town looking for somewhere to eat, and because he's hungry, everything he sees turns into food: pigeons become a meal, schoolchildren become animals, advertising hoardings become menus. Underneath the hunger is a deeper one — he keeps thinking about Molly, about the early days when they were happy, about a picnic on the Hill of Howth where she fed him a piece of seed-cake from her own mouth, about how four o'clock is getting closer. He looks into one restaurant, recoils at the sight of men shovelling food like beasts, and goes instead to Davy Byrne's pub for a cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy — a small, civilised meal eaten slowly. He has one of those quiet middle-aged thoughts about how love and food and bodies are all tangled up, and how the world is held together by people being briefly kind to each other. On his way out he helps a young blind man across the street, with real care. Then he sees Boylan on the pavement ahead, the very man, and ducks into a museum to hide. The chapter is about appetite in every sense, and about a man being decent in a city that mostly isn't.

Schema · Linati / Gilbert

Scene

The Lunch

Hour

1:00 PM

Organ

Esophagus

Art

Architecture

Color

—

Symbol

Constables

Technic

Peristaltic

Correspondence

Lestrygonians