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[ Aetat. 41-44 ] J O Y C E 5735. Borsch dosed him further with scopolamine. It became a symbol ofall his medications, and Joyce wrote a limerick about it:There's a coughmixture scopolamineAnd its equal has never been seen'Twould make staid TutankamenLaugh and leap like a salmonAnd his mummy hop Scotch on the green. 84By September 27 his eyes were better, and he put off his eighth operationso that he could finishthe last watch of Shaun. This chapter was organizedabout roads as the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter was organizedabout rivers. On October 10 he wrote Miss Weaver that he had 'producedabout three foolscapes of hammer and tongs stratification lit up by afervent prayer to the divinity which shapes our roads in favour of myponderous protagonist and his minuscule escort.' 85He also sent a cordialinvitation to his brother Stanislaus, who had just become engaged to aformer student, Nelly Lichtensteiger, to visit him 'before the Berlitz-Biarritz season begins. Surely to God it is not necessary for you to givebarking lessons to fili-de-cani fromdawn till gutter-dammerung!' 86 Stanislauscould not come at once, but promised to come later.Borsch now set the date of the operation on the left eye for November23, 1925, but the right eye had a 'suffusion' and the surgery did not takeplace until December 8 and the following Tuesday, being divided intotwo parts, 87Joyce's eighth and ninth operations. When he returned homefrom the clinic about the middle of December, he was dizzy and in pain,the left eye quite blind. The Nuttings came to see him on Christmasnight, and found him feeling almost hopeless. 'Twice a day they flash alight before my eyes and say, "You see nothing? Not anything?" I amtired of it all. This has gone on so long.' 88At the beginning of 1926 Joyce could write only in exaggeratedly largeletters. He borrowed Myron Nutting's black pencil to see if that wouldwork, and made a rude sketch of Bloom with the firstline of Homer'sOdyssey to accompany it. There was no possibility of dictating; he mustwrite and see what he was writing, he said. William Bird suggested atypewriter might be used, but Joyce, after a long silence at this impertinence,said he had no interest in such a device. (He later learned to typea little.) His pain persisted, and the eye was at firstunable to absorb theexudations that followed the operation. He lay on the couch 'waiting,' ashe said, 'for Ireland's eye* this day to do his duty.' 89But by spring hefelt a little better, and for a space of a few months he had no majordifficulties with his eyes.The whole of 1925 was taken up with the writing of the Shaun section(Part III, 403-590) in four chapters or watches and with the revision of* The name of a small island off Howth.