Stephen's thought in Telemachus about heretic
mockers, "The void awaits surely all them that weave
the wind," itself weaves an unsatisfying web of
intertextual echoes. Gifford cites similar but not identical
sayings in Isaiah and John Webster’s The
Devil’s Law Case, together asserting human impotence
against the power of God or mortality.
In Nestor, Stephen seems to apply the phrase to
himself. After pursuing some abstruse and ultimately
frustrating Aristotelian speculations, he thinks, "Weave,
weaver of the wind." Commenting on this passage,
Thornton notes a similarity to language in Blake's Jerusalem,
but confesses, "I feel however that there is some other more
specific source for the weaving allusions which I have not
found." Gifford notes that "In ancient Irish tradition weaving
is connected with the art of prophecy"—a connection which
hardly seems relevant either to Stephen's dismal, claustrophic
thoughts about history or to his futile efforts to make
theoretical sense of it. In still another part of Nestor,
he thinks of Jesus' dark sayings being "woven and
woven on the church's looms." Here too, the image seems to imply
failure to grasp the truth.
An analogue more suited to Stephen's thoughts in both
chapters can be found in T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion,
whose speaker says, “Vacant shuttles / Weave the wind.” If
there was borrowing, however, it seems more likely to have
been practiced by Eliot, who was reading Ulysses in
the years leading up to its publication, and who once wrote,
"Bad poets borrow. Good poets steal." (Eliot began working on
Gerontion in 1917, two years after Joyce substantially
completed Telemachus, and he did not publish the
poem until 1920. Joyce wrote out a fair copy
manuscript of Telemachus in 1917, and it was printed
in the Little Review in 1918.)
