Sun-Compelled

Past two in the morning in Ithaca, the seventeenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom sits alone downstairs with a bank book and his father's last letter, and lets the question surface: should he leave Molly? Philip Kitcher watches the questioner take it up with a straight face, prove an answer, then offer a departing husband holiday destinations, a way of steering by the stars, and the sort of reward notice you post for a lost dog. Then comes a single word, borrowed from the sky, and Kitcher reads it as the questioner never could. The chapter has circled one woman since Bloom came home; here it says so.