"You may fail to see the lie of that layout"

(270.29-272.8)  Ok, I admit it:  I found today's reading borderline-incomprehensible.  The good news is that it doesn't appear that I'm alone on this one.  Campbell and Robinson call the next few pages "very difficult" and offer a fairly detailed explanation of what's going on in today's short passage based upon the corresponding text of Shem's marginalia before noting, "We do not promise that we have correctly related the passages in the body of the text to the principles named in the margin; readers will have to do this job themselves!"

Here's my shot in the dark at what's going on in today's text.  We're seeing correspondences between the subject matter of each day's reading and a particular area of study.  For instance, yesterday's text dealt with the subject of grammar, and Tuesday's dealt with geography.  Today's passage is concerned with history as constructed or chronicled by the four wise men (here the heads of four houses of Ireland:  O'Brien, O'Connor, Mac Loughlin, and Mac Namara).  Their knowledge is pooled together and our focus is turned on Julius Caesar ("Sire Jeallyous Seizer") and the Second Triumvirate ("the tryonforit of Oxtheivious, Lapidous and Malthouse Anthemy").  In terms of Wake archetypes, Caesar is the HCE figure (the singular leading figure) and the Second Triumvirate is the three soldiers (who are connected, however tenuously, to the downfall of the singular leading figure and are left to deal with the fallout surrounding his death).

Much like history does, the rest of the paragraph looks backward from there.  And much like the Wake does, the rest of the paragraph moves toward the elemental.  Whereas the previous pages moved "forward" from war to seduction, this paragraph moves "backward" from seduction to war to Eden.  The triumphs of history are thus reduced to destiny, as we see when HCE's initials are reversed:  "Eat early earthapples.  Coax Cobra to chatters.  Hail, Heva, we hear!"  Original sin required the eating of the apple, which required the serpent's temptation, which required the existence of Eve.

The end of the passage reduces history even further.  Existence is reduced to defining physical features of the two sexes -- "But it's tails for toughs and titties for totties" -- and then further reduced to first origins -- "and come buckets come bats till deeleet."  Here, the final "deeleet" is "daylight" (as noted by McHugh), referring to the first dawning of the sun.  It's also "delete," or the complete absence of anything -- in other words, the void that preceded existence.  History, which has been demonstrated throughout the Wake to be cyclical, can thus be viewed as the study of destiny (humanity as passive vessels of fate), which is the polar principle opposite of courage (humanity as active forces shaping the world) according to Shem's marginalia.

Now . . . does that make any sense?  I don't know.