Lonechill

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After all the animated conversation, after Stephen refuses his offer to stay the night, after he shakes Bloom's hand and strolls unconcernedly away down the lane, Bloom is left standing by himself under the stars. Question: "Alone, what did Bloom hear?" Answer: "The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the double vibration of a jew's harp in the resonant lane." More insistently: "Alone, what did Bloom feel?" Answer: "The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur." Yet another question: "Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind him?" Answer: of six "companions" now deceased. One of them, Percy Apjohn, was in the list of late-night conversationalists who once kept him company and whose absence promises a progressively greater loss of human connectedness.

The narrative has stripped the heaventree of its lush beauty by noting that human beings cannot survive its airless voids, by consigning its captivating lights to a past from which they once emerged eons ago, and by attributing to it a frigidity past human imagining. As Stephen's feet tramp down "the heavenborn earth" this cosmic sterility becomes infused also with human loneliness. It is the coldest, darkest moment in the novel.