Stephen Dedalus’s struggle is with a Proteus of the intellect. Appropriately he is walking on the mud-flats of Sandymount strand, some nine miles from Dalkey and Mr Deasy’s school. His mind is tussling with the problem of the changing face of the world in relation to the reality behind it. The revelation of that reality reaches us under the changing, limited modes of the visible and the audible, within the dimensions of the spatial and the temporal, the one-thing-next-another (‘nebeneinander’) and the one-thing-after-another (‘nacheinander’). Stephen’s starting-point is that things are presented to us under the shifting mode of their visibility. It is the signatures of things, rather than their reality, which our minds receive through eyesight. Aristotle, whom Dante calls the Master of those who know (‘maestro di color die sanno’), put recognition of objects as bodies prior to awareness of colour. Stephen closes his eyes to study what experience is like when the mode of visibility is excluded; then, in the darkness, notes how the mode of audibility asserts itself in the tapping of his stick and of his feet, the crackling and crushing of shells and pebbles and sand beneath them. In these sounds rhythm emerges and pattern is born.