Lost His Way

A typed letter from a woman he has never met, a pressed flower, and a lane off Cumberland Street: this is James Joyce's Leopold Bloom at ten in the morning, in the fifth episode of Ulysses, the Lotus Eaters. Philip Kitcher starts with the strangest sentence in the chapter, a murmur made of flowers, and asks a simple question: whose words are these? He follows Bloom under a railway bridge and out of a chemist's toward the baths, and wants to know why Joyce would open his hero's wanderings with a morning of errands. The answer is a judgment on Bloom, and it gives this episode its name.