'You Are Precisely My Cup of Tea'

Rubob and Tine took only a short walk again Sunday afternoon. The village had plunged back into a deep freeze, with a snowstorm on the way, and Tine was weary after her one party of the year, at a neighbor's house the night before.

"It was nice seeing everyone, wasn't it Tine?" Rubob asked as they passed a neighbor's gate. "We haven't really gotten to know many people over the years, have we?"



"It was rather pleasant, Rubob," Tine said. "Most of the time -- the entire rest of the year, in fact -- it's like what Budgen says to Joyce about Londoners: "'I keep myself to myself.' "

Last night, Tine had picked up Rubob's "The Making of Ulysses" by Frank Budgen again, in her ongoing effort to plumb the depths of Rubob's mind, and also with a new-found interest in delving into Joyce.

"The neighbors keep to themselves, just as we do," Tine said. "We don't venture out much into the world at large, do we?"

Rubob and Tine had gathered in a convivial circle of neighbors around a fireplace, with their drinks on the coffee table and their plates in their laps. Tine didn't say much, but she enjoyed listening, and she particularly enjoyed the carrot cake -- not to mention the cosmopolitan that nearly knocked her out. Rubob had quaffed innumerable glasses of plonk and then stuffed himself with several platefuls of grilled pork.

"Yes," Tine said, "that was a delicious cosmopolitan."

"What was that quote from the 1950s newspaper story that Mr. Derek showed us about 'cosmopolitan filth,' Tine?" Rubob asked.

"'Complaints of "cosmopolitan filth" in places of public entertainment, voiced by Radio Budapest, have led to the immediate dismissal of dance bands thoughout the Hungarian capital.' That was it, Rubob," Tine said.

Rubob chuckled over the quote, and Tine added, "Hungary didn't want to get to know the neighbors, I suppose. They were 'cosmopolitan filth.'"

As she continued down the street with Rubob, she hummed "Getting to Know You" to herself.

"Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you,
Getting to hope you like me.
Getting to know you,
Putting it my way,
But nicely,
You are precisely,
My cup of tea."

A teacher from Miss Porter's School, carrying a cane, walked by on the opposite side of the street.

"It's a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you'll be taught.
As a teacher I've been learning
(You'll forgive me if I boast)
And I've now become an expert,
On the subject I like most.
Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you."

Tine thought of James Joyce again, with his long, thin cane.

"You know, Rubob, you always talk about Stephen Dedalus -- what Budgen says about him. Haven't you read the chapters on Leopold Bloom in 'The Making of Ulysses'? Or is it that you prefer Dedalus over Bloom? What's Bloom like? We haven't gotten to know him on our walks, have we?"

"Yes, I've read the chapters on Bloom, Tine," Rubob said.

"And you read the entire 'Ulysses,' word by word, line by line, without falling asleep?"

"Yes, Tine," Rubob said. "Bloom's a much more complete character than Dedalus."

"Like Ulysses, Rubob -- like what Joyce told Budgen about Ulysses in 'The Odyssey' -- that he was the most complete character in literature," Tine said. "Hamlet wasn't complete because he was just a son, and Faust -- well, we hardly even know what he looks like, and he's overshadowed by Mephistopheles."

"That's right, Tine. Ulysses was a father, a son, a husband, a friend. And he wasn't just a warrior, but a conscientious objector before he went to war. And his history doesn't end after the war with Troy. In some ways, it's just beginning. He becomes the wanderer."

"And what about Bloom, the modern-day Ulysses, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"He's as complete a person as one can imagine, Tine," Rubob said. "He's someone who's rounded -- and seen from every side. You see everything he does, everything he thinks. Richard Ellman says every artist seeks to bring into his work substance and imagination, to blend reality and imagination, heaven and earth."

"And who's Richard Ellman when he's at home?" Tine asked.

"He's an English critic, Tine. He wrote biographies of Joyce and Oscar Wilde. He's dead now."

"Severely dead," Tine said. It occurred to her that she was meeting even more of the neighbors this afternoon, her neighbors in the world at large, living and dead.

"Anyway, that's what Joyce does, Tine, what Ellman writes about: He makes heaven and earth, the real and the imagined, equal partners. He gives the reader everything. He believed that fiction had been avoiding a complete view of its characters, avoiding sex, defecation, farting -- the works. He showed us Bloom in his kitchen, the bedroom, the outhouse, the butcher's, the post office -- everywhere -- and most especially in his mind, his imagination."

Tine and Rubob were passing the stairway to the school, and it seemed to be inviting them up for a look inside, Tine thought.



"Bloom's not like Ulysses in that he's a great warrior, of course," Rubob continued. "But as Budgen writes, Joyce believed that character was revealed not so much in grand actions, but in how we go about doing simple things. Budgen says something like, 'How a man ties his shoelaces or eats his egg gives us a better clue about him than how he goes to war.' "

"And how did Bloom eat his egg, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"I don't know," Rubob said, "but I imagine with relish. He ate everything with relish, especially sausages and kidneys. He liked 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls' and 'thick giblet soup.' "

"It sounds like you at the party last night, Rubob."

They passed a curving staircase, with rounded stone steps.



"Stephen Dedalus is very different from Bloom," Rubob said. "Dedalus isn't so fully formed, and you don't get as complete a picture of him. He's young, not really himself yet, not at peace with himself, and he's not at home in Dublin. Stephen leaves his home at the beginning of the novel -- a tower he shares with Buck Mulligan, a medical student, and Haines, an English student. He isn't close to either one of them, and he feels only hostility toward Mulligan. Stephen's home is only a temporary place. Like Joyce, he'll leave Ireland and become an exile."

As the two approached old Mrs. Riddle's estate on Mountain Road, Rubob stopped to admire the house by the gate.



"That's a splendid house, Tine," he said. "We got a peek at the garden at least, on the garden tour a couple of years ago.

"That's where we got the blackberry bush," Tine said.

"Yes, he gave a few to you, didn't he?" Rubob said.

"And they've flourished in their new soil, haven't they?" Tine said. "He'd warned us they'd need cutting back frequently."

Tine and Rubob arrived at the gates to old Mrs. Riddle's estate.



"But tell me more about Bloom, Rubob. Wasn't he a bit of a wanderer, too, in Dublin?" Tine asked.

"Even though he's a wanderer, an outsider, a Jew in Dublin, he's still at home in the city, taking center stage in it in the novel," Rubob said. "He's part of it, and it's part of him. In the Lotus Eaters episode, as he wanders the city streets, he surrenders to every impression of the moment, absorbs it all in a dream-like mood. When he reaches the baths, he imagines himself lying naked in a womb of warmth."

"He's absorbed in his city, Rubob, just as we are in our village -- even though we're sort of outsiders, newcomers," Tine said. "Sometimes I feel it's all laid out here for us to see, like all the furniture stacked outside in the lot in the great fire of 1864, but we don't often get to see inside the houses and meet the people. That's why the party was so nice. "

Tine and Rubob followed the pathway to Mrs. Riddle's old colonial home.



"But back to Bloom, Rubob."

"There's an air of satisfaction, of equanimity about him, Tine -- more than an air," Rubob said. "Stephen, on the other hand, is dissatisfied, hostile. He feels put upon by past and present, by the English and the Irish."

Tine saw a bulldozer in the distance, blocking the road leading to old Mrs. Riddle's house.



"I'm losing my equanimity with that there, Rubob," she said -- "or the estate's losing its equanimity. It's not the same with the road all dug up. Let's turn back."

"Just put blinders on, Tine," Rubob said.

"I can't Rubob," Tine replied. "The world at large is intruding. It's cosmopolitan filth."

"Earth and heaven are no longer equal partners," she thought, facing the obstructed view and harking back to Budgen and Joyce. "It's all about moving the earth right now. Reality's won out over imagination."

The two left Mrs. Riddle's estate, crossed the street and passed a birch tree that had been damaged in the recent windstorm.

"Felled in the tempest," Tine said.

"That reminds me, Tine: I've been reading 'The Tempest' the past two nights," Rubob said.



"There's a purity, a simplicity about the play. Of all Shakespeare's plays, it's the most like Tine," Rubob said. "It's as if Tine wrote it. And there are so many disputes over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, maybe you did write it."

"Why do you like Shakespeare so much, Rubob -- and why Joyce?" Tine asked. "Generally, you enjoy reading histories, not fiction. What draws you so much to these works of the imagination?"
"I don't know, Tine," Rubob said. "I suppose the works of Shakespeare and Joyce are monuments in the history of literature. Joyce is like the Irish Proust. 'Ulysses' is an immense achievement, almost like a foreign language you can enjoy in translation."

"But what do you gain from 'Ulysses,' Rubob? Do you gain knowledge or wisdom from it, or is it just entertaining to read and interesting to puzzle over?"

"There are some delightful parts in it, Tine," Rubob said.

"Budgen and others are helpful with the inscrutable parts, I suppose," Tine said.

The two passed a lawn ornament that intrigued Tine.



"Stephen Dedalus has his own theories on Shakespeare in Ulysses," Rubob said.

"What are they, Rubob?"

"The question arises, which play best reveals the personality of Shakespeare? Why are there so many plots with 'the betrayed king, banished lover, deserted father and disillusioned friend,' as Budgen writes? A poet known as A. E. in 'Ulysses' gives his theory that Shakespeare's passion and despair are embodied in the character of Hamlet. But Stephen Dedalus maintains that as an actor, Shakespeare always played Hamlet's father, the ghost of the murdered king. Shakespeare had a son who died at the age of twelve, and his name was Hamnet, with an 'n.' Hamlet represents Shakespeare's son. And as for Hamlet's mother, the guilty queen, she represents Shakespeare's wife, Ann Hathaway. "

A cat on a porch was studying Tine and Rubob as they passed.



"Stephen's Hamlet is somewhat like himself -- someone who's discontented and leaves his home," Rubob said. "Stephen believes that Shakespeare left his home in Stratford not just to seek his fortune in London but to get away from his wife. He'd married her when he was 18, and she was 30, and the marriage had soured. When he died, he left her nothing but 'the second best bed with the furniture.' "

Tine and Rubob, heading home, passed the hut where Henry David Thoreau and Will Warren worshipped next to the church, in an outreach program for wilderness lovers. (Tine Relives the Fire of 1864.)



"I was reading Thoreau's essay 'Walking' last night, Rubob," Tine said, "and here's what he says about Joyce, Shakespeare and all the rest of them:

"Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself -- and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. "

"Thoreau might have said it about himself, too, Rubob, " Tine said.

They then passed by a house on Main Street that Tine imagined might have been Shakespeare's, for one reason or another.



"I suppose Shakespearean scholars are always hoping he'll open his doors to them," Tine thought.

"I've been wondering the whole walk why people read the works of Joyce and Shakespeare," she said to Rubob. "I don't think it's entirely because they're monuments in the history of literature. That's part of it, of course, because people like monuments. But I think the main reason is that they're like 'lights that make the darkness visible.' For a time, they really do 'shatter the temple of knowledge itself' -- not just for a time, in fact, because they live on. They're timeless. We get as much out of them today as people did when they first appeared -- maybe even more because we have people like Budgen and Allman to explain them to us."



"Ellman, Tine," Rubob said.

"Emmon," Tine said.

"I think they open doors for us," Tine said, "in a village we all belong to. We're all newcomers in the village, outsiders, looking for a way in, and for illumination in the darkness."



"For Thoreau, it was like that light in the woods yesterday -- out there in the wild places he and Will Warren were drawn to," Tine said.



"But for others it's a light we find by getting to know our neighbors, including Joyce, Shakespeare, Budgen, Dedalus, Bloom -- everyone, real and imagined, next door and in Ireland, on earth and in heaven," she said.

Rubob took Tine's hand, and she started to hum "Getting to Know You" again.

"For me, Rubob, you're my light. You're my doorway to new realms of knowledge. In fact, you are precisely my cup of tea," Tine said. And it struck her that a nice up of tea might be just the thing when she returned home from her walk, perhaps Indian Spice.

It hadn't been a long walk really, but they'd covered a lot of ground.

Tine remembered something she'd read in Budgen's book the night before and she repeated it to Rubob: "Blake said he could touch the ends of space with his walking stick at the end of his garden."

"It does seem that way, doesn't it, Tine?"

"That's how it always is in this village," Tine said -- "especially with Joyce's long cane."

As they arrived at their doorstep, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."