It Begins Again: Ulysses in 80

This is my third, or, perhaps, fourth year reading James Joyce’s epic book Ulysses. This is a group of people around the world who agree to read the novel over an eighty day period. I am reading an audiobook and a print version of the Penguin Gabler edition.

Today, I noticed this line. I liked the sound of it as I heard it:

A deaf gardener, sprints, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower on the summer lawn watching narowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

I asked Google’s AI Gemini to comment on the sentence, especially the last three words. Here is one idea it gave me.

In addition to noting the archaic word grasshalms. It said, “The gardener is staring intently at the debris of his own work—the fragmented, broken "grasshalms." This is a perfect metaphor for the intellectual artist or critic who, like Stephen (and perhaps like Arnold), spends so much time analyzing the fine details of art, language, and culture ("the dancing motes") that they lose touch with the people and the "sombre" life happening right in front of them.”