I have walked on the Sandymount Strand in this picture, which is about one block from the B & B where I stayed several times. More importantly, this is where Stephen walked in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses.

Text from the "Proteus" episode.

"The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. TERRIBILIA MEDITANS. A primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned. All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of . . . We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. NATURLICH, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see! Who's behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing
quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I ... With him together down ... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost. "

Notes:

The "he" in "He saved men from drowning" is Buck Mulligan.

The Guido reference is from Boccaccio's Decameron. "Guido Cavalcanti, an Italian poet and a friend of Dante, walks from the church of San Michele in Florence to the Church of San Giovanni, where some acquaintances find him brooding among the tombs. They say: "Let us go and plague him (to ally himself with them). "Guido, you refuse to be of our society; but, when you have found out there is no god, what good will it have done?" Guido answers: "Gentlemen, you may use me as you please in your own house." After Guido leaves, his mockers finally understand the nature of Guido's witty rebuke: "Consider, then, these arches are the abode of the dead, and he calls them our house to show us that we . . . are, in comparison with him and other men of letter, worse than dead men." Thus, the word Stephen omits, "House of . . . ," is decay or death."*

Stephen believes that he is a pretender and a coward. He lists several people who were pretenders including Ireland, which is the " Paradise of pretenders " since it supported the Yorkist pretenders to the throne of England in the fifteenth century and the Stuart pretenders from 1688-1745. Then Stephen wonders whether he would save a drowning person. The answer he would try, but fail.

The word " abstrusiosities" which is used only once in Ulysses refers to the Guido story, but it is a word that has also been used to describe some of Joyce's works. The Proteus episode is fascinating, but it is very dense. There is very little action. The reader experiences much of Stephen's interior monologue.

*Ulysses Annotated, Don Gifford