This post briefly looks at a line from I.1 and a callback to it in I.5.

In the first chapter, the following sentence appears:

This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns.

The earth and time itself — this earth of ours and all our years — appear as a kind of humus made up of brickdust. All the elements are mixed up in it so that they can return. “The same returns” could be a slogan for Finnegans Wake itself, and the same ancient stories/archetypes don’t just return – they rotate like the planet, recombining in new forms and varying.

In Hebrew, the words for man, earth, and red [like red bricks] all have the same root, adm (Adam).

In the margins next to this sentence, I wrote “homos” (as in, Man). On another pass through the text, I wrote “home.”

Our home, a rotating humus.

In I.5, I caught a callback to this line. A description of The Letter (representing Finnegans Wake itself, or all literature or all dreams) reads,

as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return

Again, brickdust returns (along with other materials here). Literature is like the earth; we return to it (and it returns the eternal stories) just as the earth rotates and returns to the same spot.

The word “radiooscillating” reminds me that there are so many radio waves traveling across the earth that it’s surprising the earth doesn’t hum (humus) as it rotates.

The physical earth, other human beings, works of literature. All of them are a kind of humus that richly nourishes us. All of them are Home.