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[ Aetat. 40-41 ] J O Y C E 55inatural power, but that he has an insight into the methods and motivationsof the universe. Samuel Beckett has remarked that to Joyce realitywas a paradigm, an illustration of a possibly unstatable rule. 97Yet perhapsthe rule can be surmised. It is not a perception of order or of love;more humble than either of these, it is the perception of coincidence.According to this rule, reality, no matter how much we try to manipulateit, can only assume certain forms; the roulette wheel brings up the samenumbers again and again; everyone and everything shift about in continualmovement, yet movement limited in its possibilities. Joyce was interestedin variation and sameness in time: Bloom consoles himself with thethought that every betrayal is only one of an infinite series; 98if someonementioned a new atrocity to Joyce, he at once pointed out some equallyhorrible old atrocity, such as an act of the Inquisition in Holland. 99'Rienne se cree, rien ne se perd,'* he explained to Mercanton. 100He was interestedalso in variation and sameness in space, in the cubist method ofestablishing differing relations among aspects of a single thing, and hewould ask Beckett to do some research for him in the possible permutationsof an object. That the picture of Cork in his Paris flatshould have,as he emphasized to Frank O'Connor, a cork frame, 101was a deliberate,if half-humorous, indication of this notion of the world, where unexpectedsimultaneities are the rule. The characters pass through sequencesof situations and thoughts bound by coincidence with the situations andthoughts of other living and dead men and of fictional, mythical men.Do Bloom and Stephen coincidentally think the same thoughts at thesame times? Do they wander and flylike Ulysses and Daedalus? They areexamples of a universal process.In all his books up to Finnegans Wake Joyce sought to reveal thecoincidence of the present with the past. Only in Finnegans Wake washe to carry his conviction to its furthest reaches, by implying that thereis no present and no past, that there are no dates, that time—and languagewhich is time's expression—is a series of coincidences which aregeneral all over humanity. Words move into words, people into people,incidents into incidents like the ambiguities of a pun, or a dream. Wewalk through darkness on familiar roads.Joyce began to weave Finnegans Wake like a new integument, t OnMarch 11, 1923, he announced to Miss Weaver, 'Yesterday I wrote twopages—the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having founda pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting ona double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. II lupo perde il peloma non il vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may lose his skin but not his* 'Nothing is created, nothing is lost.'t For a table of composition of the book during the first ten years, see note 104, pp.794-6.