“Hold on to the now,” Stephen tells himself in the library, “the here, through which all future plunges to the past,” words that contain at once a philosophy of life and a poetics. In the discussion of Plato and Aristotle there, Stephen suggests that Aristotle would have considered Hamlet’s musings on death, this “improbable, insignificant, and undramatic monologue,” to be quite as shallow as Plato’s.
