As Shaun's sermon goes on, the language remains remarkably clear. According to JJ's scheme, III.2 is the second watch of the night, called concubium. It is before impestata nox, where dreams become troubling. In the second watch, a deep sleep may be achieved, but it is also the time that two people sharing a bed may awaken and make love. Shaun speaks about sex so much in this episode that the connection has to be made.
As he takes a moment to reflect on himself, to assess how he has been doing and let his audience know that he still has plenty of gas left in the tank, he remarks that he is in "no violent hurry." Can we see the color violet here, and the end of the rainbow? A few pages later (453) he thinks about a future when he can return to Dublin "when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower," so the idea that the world is in flood is still in play. He reflects on how lovely a night it is and on "the beausome of the exhaling night." The body (Gk. soma) is perfectly at rest ("lapidated," as he says earlier, turned to stone) and is lost in a lovely sleep, and the harmony of nature around it presents a scene full of beauty. Shaun wishes he did not have to leave but could stay forever under the tree and beside the river, and listen to the birds warble.
Before the modern era, people would often awake at this time of the night and eat, talk, check on their children, or have sex. This does not seem to be the case here, but the texture and topic of this episode suggests the dreamer is in deepest, or at least most placid sleep. The stars are shining at their brightest ("he gaped in wulderment, his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction"), at the darkest part of the night between dusk and dawn. Shaun, who is symbolized by the stone and who represents time, would flourish naturally at this point. The dreamer is so lost to himself that he is completely unaware of time passing, just like Shaun is talking and talking, and picking up again after seemingly ending his sermon several times.
If you are awake at this time of the night (as Shaun imagines himself), you can get a profound sense of distance. Shaun mentions how he would like to be "hearing the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial and the mails across the nightrives." At night, when the interference of the sun's rays is gone and the atmosphere presents itself as a wide expanse for long-echoing radio waves, you can pick up stations in AM broadcasting from halfway across the world. With no street noise, you can hear the moving machinery of the night shift and the supply chains moving. This is not something I hear anymore now that I live in Europe, but deep in the night I would listen to train whistles blowing far away, longly as they passed through street crossings, or quickly as they slowly pulled themselves into yards. I remember laying on my bed in my first apartment in Dallas and, one time, hearing a train whistle make the *knock, knock knock KNOCK, knock* pattern, eerily reminding me that there was somebody behind this sound, that it was only disembodied because of my hearing at a distance. The miles between my quiet bedroom window and the train yard, over parking lots and flashing street lights and empty highways and merging lanes were made sensible to me in that instant through the traveling sound and my hearing.
[FW 449]
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