"Three times the concentred
     self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
     having possessed
The object, grips it
     in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
     once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
     once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
     this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
     fully found."

... By an
epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself. He believed that it
was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme
care, seeing that they themselves are the most
delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of
the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany.
Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his
no less inscrutable countenance:

-- Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it
time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It
is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's
street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it
is: epiphany.

-- What?

-- Imagine my glimpses at that clock
as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to
an exact focus. The moment the focus is
reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I
find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.

-- Yes? said Cranly absently.

-- No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen
relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the
lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in
black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition.
Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and
the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to
reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means
impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has
ever been adored on the earth by an examination
into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in
red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason
for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from
that which we have though our diets are
quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in
action.

-- Yes ...

-- You know what Aquinas says: The
three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry
and radiance. Some day I will expand that
sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind
when confronted with any object, hypothetically
beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire
universe into two parts, the object, and the void
which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from
everything else: and then you perceive that
it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise
its integrity. Isn't that so?

-- And then?

-- That is the first quality of beauty:
it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which
apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind
considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to
other objects, examines the balance of
its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny
of the structure. So the mind receives the
impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the
object is in the strict sense of the word,
a thing, a
definitely constituted entity. You see?

-- Let us turn back, said Cranly.

They had reached the corner of Grafton
St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards.
Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics
of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen
took his arm summarily and led him away.

-- Now for the third quality. For a
long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative
word (a very unusual thing for him) but
I have solved it. Claritas
is quidditas. After
the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only
logically possible synthesis and discovers
the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we
recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we
recognise that it is
an organised composite structure, a thing in
fact: finally, when the relation of the
parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point,
we recognise that it is that thing
which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment
of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of
which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant.
The object achieves its epiphany.

Having finished his argument Stephen
walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself
of having cheapened the eternal images
of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his
friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant
familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:

-- It has not epiphanised yet, he said.

"What
have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men... The occasion
Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening....
smiles when I say I don't know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew,
who has upset the whole world's notions of time and space, once leaned
down... to ask me... ragged freshman... at the first approach of the
evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock
neither of us had noticed."

An approach of
the evening star yesterday:

This figure is from a webpage,
"The Rotation of the Elements,"
cited here yesterday evening.

As noted in yesterday's early-
morning entry on Quine, the
figure is (without the labels)
a classic symbol of the
evening star.

"The
appearance of the evening star brings with it long-standing notions of
safety within and danger without. In a letter to Harriet Monroe,
written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that
invokes the genius of evening: 'Evening star that bringest back all
that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou
bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.'
Christmas, writes Stevens, 'is like Sappho's evening: it brings us all
home to the fold' (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248)."

-- Barbara Fisher,
"The Archangel of Evening,"
Chapter 5 of Wallace Stevens:
The Intensest Rendezvous,
The University Press of Virginia, 1990