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—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch.
I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the
backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was
that not desire?
—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told
me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite
school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.
Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again
rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking
them from his pockets.
—O, I did! I did! he cried.
Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at
him for a moment boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering
from his laughter, answered his look from his humbled eyes.
The long slender flattened skull beneath the long pointed
cap brought before Stephen’s mind the image of a hooded
reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze. Yet
at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit
by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul,
poignant and self-embittered.
—As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are
all animals. I also am an animal.
—You are, said Lynch.
—But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen contin-
ued. The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic
means are really not esthetic emotions not only because
they are kinetic in character but also because they are not
more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads
and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely

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