Excerpt from Proteus, Ulysses
By James Joyce, published 1922

Stephen sees a midwife on Sandymount Strand

PROTEUS Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:
coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane...
Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount
strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick...
They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently,
Frauenzimmer: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet             
sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty
mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp
poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence
MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street.
One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing.
What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in
ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh.
That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos
Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought,
one.
    Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had
no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum,
no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
everlasting. Womb of sin.
    Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the
man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her
breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the
ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna
stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son
are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius  to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.  Illstarred
heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With
beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a
widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion  with clotted hinderparts.
    Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming,
waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds
of Mananaan...

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might
not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the
fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O
si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More
tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain:
Naked women! Naked women! What about that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?...
My soul walks with me,form of forms.
 So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood...Who watches me here? ...
Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover
clinging, the more the more.
    She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the
blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of
the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? ...
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. C, .ouch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.Sad too. Touch, touch me...
 He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
carefully.