Episode 4 — Calypso

The novel's second movement opens four hours earlier, with the same eight a.m. light over a different house. Leopold Bloom is in the kitchen at 7 Eccles Street. The first sentence of his half of the novel: "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." He is making breakfast. The cat is at his feet, meowing for milk. He sets out his wife Molly's breakfast tray. He thinks about kidneys and decides to walk down the road to Dlugacz's pork butcher's and buy one for himself.

He does. The walk is the day's first piece of interior monologue from him — a different mind from Stephen's, less philosophical, more practical, more curious about other people. He notices the woman next door at Dlugacz's. He buys his kidney and walks home with it wrapped in newspaper. He picks up the morning post: a letter for Molly from Boylan, which he hands to her without comment, knowing what it is; a letter and a postcard for himself from Milly, his fifteen-year-old daughter, away in Mullingar working as a photographer's assistant. Milly's letter mentions a young student named Bannon. Bloom is faintly worried.

He puts the kidney on the pan and goes upstairs with Molly's tea and toast. Molly has read Boylan's letter — he is coming at four. She asks Bloom, lazily, what "metempsychosis" means; he explains it is the transmigration of souls. He goes back downstairs; the kidney has burned slightly on one side. He eats it with bread and butter and reads Milly's letter again. He goes out to the outhouse at the end of the garden, sits, reads the newspaper. The hour has been spent on the most ordinary actions a man can take in his own kitchen. The novel intends for that to be enough.