I ate the wind

• I hate → cf. Hamlet 3.2.99: I eat the air, which sounds like I hate the heir (Hamlet is speaking to Claudius).
  • Other references to Shakespeare’s tragedies nearby: → moor before the tomb, cousin charmian

• I ate the wind: cf. W B Yeats description of Maud Gonne: Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind. Among School Children, the poem in which this line occurs, was written in June 1926, four months before Joyce drafted this paragraph, but it was first published in The London Mercury in August 1927, so it must be just a coincidence.

• I ate the wind: in Vico’s 1st Age, mute religious acts constitute language

• I ate the wind: I was so poor that I had nothing to eat but the wind