"Enten eller, either or."

(280.4-282.4)  Maybe getting back to (almost) daily readings is helping me get back into my Wake groove, maybe the reading in this chapter is getting less obscure, or maybe it's a combination of both of those things, but I am feeling like things are beginning to make a little more sense for me now.  Today's reading continues from the dreamy scene we left off from yesterday.  Near the continually renewing river in which the stock of salmon is regenerated year after year, Isabel (or another female figure) writes another letter.  This one is addressed to "desired subject, A.N.," implying the widowed ALP.  Rather than going into the juicy gossip characteristic of yesterday's letter, today's letter is a cliched one expressing condolences.

Stepping away from the letter, we see Isabel -- now the "Pious and pure fair one" -- walking amongst "lifetrees leaves whose silence hiterto has shone as sphere of silver fastalbarnstone."  In the evening, we have reached the point of the daily life cycle dominated by death, but that death brings the hope of renewal.  This hope is encapsulated in the narrator's call to utilize the four elements:  "Sleep in the water, drug at the fire, shake the dust off and dream your one who would give her sidecurls to."

Following this is a paragraph written in French that closely follows a passage written by Edgar Quinet.  In a nutshell, the passage shows us how nature -- here in the form of flowers -- will outlast even the greatest of human civilizations, with each successive generation of plant life cheerily laughing off human frivolity.  The next paragraph serves as an inverse to this, with nature being ignored by warring men, here in the form of Brutus and Cassius.  These two -- archetypes of the twins Shem and Shaun -- are prepared to engage in battle to determine who will stand in the place of the vanquished Caesar.  The object of their fighting is Isabel, and the narrator wonders whether she will truly love the victor before noting that power vacuums are seized by those who had previously been moving about freely and unnoticed like the oxygen in the air.

Today's reading ends with the focus turned from Brutus and Cassius toward the deposed Caesar, who has "sobs for his job," "tears for his toil," and "horror for his squalor," yet still has "pep for his perdition."