Ulysses page-by-page: Page 28 (2.134-170) "Do you understand... palaces of both"

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Delaney: [66] [67] [68] [69] Useen: [11] [11b] [12] [13] [14] [map] [*]
Delaney: [65]

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— Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
— Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.

Sargent ignores SD's question, or mishears it

— Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.
— No, sir.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life?

SD seems to be refining his mental descriptions again: cf "His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a snail's bed... Futility"

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not." [PoA5, Cranly]

Delaney: [66]

His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been.

Columbanus "the mother... watched over him with so great care that she would scarcely entrust him even to his nearest relatives... [he] glowing with the fire of youth... leaping over both threshold and mother" [cite] c560AD

Delaney: [67]

A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

'red reek' = color/smell synesthesia
'rapine' = plunder (not bloody)
'in his fur' (not 'on')

cf Swift's Polite Conversation: "her Nails... were long enough to scratch her Granum out of her Grave" [cite]

why "in... up"? (according to the riddle he's burying not plundering, but maybe he's killed his grandmother by plundering?)

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors.

why "slanted"? just fear of direct gaze?

fieldhockey originally used cricket balls

morrice/morris dancing [youtube]
"squares and cubes" hints that these boys are older than they sound

Delaney: [68]

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
— Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
— Yes, sir.
In long shady strokes Sargent copied the data.

why 'shady'?
"the data" = the given (Euclid's "Data" supplemented his "Elements")

Delaney: [69]

Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony, sit in the dark palaces of both

"subjective and objective" = the mother loves/ the mother is loved

swaddling bands

"once or lightly" is SD imagining touching his own memories, or touching Sargent kindly, sympathetically? i think at that time it would have been uncontroversial for a teacher to lay a warm hand on a student, even alone, but we've already seen SD using a book to avoid direct contact

is Sargent in this chapter a premonition of Bloom, as the milkwoman (maybe) was in ch1?

Delaney cites Alice Milligan's poem, The Dark Palace

mysteries:

[DD 02:57-04:51]