Nestor

Mr. Deasy seems to be a believer in the accessibility of the past, as if, to use Plato’s metaphor, the mind is a wax tablet receiving an impression of our experiences, as if our brain files these away and we can refer back to the original impression. Deasy has many relics glorifying and legitimizing the past, a past that contains actual events and also a history of mythology (religion): paintings and spoons being one example. He is also a firm believer of the future; all of history moves toward one great goal, which is the manifestation of God.
One of the opening passages contradicts this idea, and speaks, from Stephen’s perspective, of a more mutable past.

“Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it… I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame,” (24).

The frame work of the past slips though time, becoming inaccessible, but yet at the same time, there are ways to access at least an abstraction of it, as the student does when reading Lycidas. But, as soon as the passage is over, the child leans back having just remembered, and the memory slips away seconds after it is recalled, or created. The poem recalls Edward King, walking on the waves; it is a poem with a sort of mythic element about a man who actually lived, a mixture reminiscent of relics in Deasy’s office and of the children begging Stephen to tell them a ghost story during a history lesson.
However, these ideas of Stephen are mutable themselves, and he realizes that even though the past is out of reach, it creates a momentum that thrusts part of it into the future with the potential of giving him a back kick, a future that Deasy helps to create and Stephen works against (to ourselves…new paganism…omphalos…)
What is real then? Stephen ponders. Is it a mother’s love, a mother who has no choice but to love, and if there is no choice, is there value in that love? And either way, if it is of value or not, she can not be there every moment, on the hockey field or after she has died. The fox buries his dead mother.
There are other differences between Deasy and Stephen. Stephen sees humankind in the inescapable clutches of sin at every moment, while Deasy believes we are all born into the original sin of Eve, the sin of woman, and that the grace of the good lord will save us from that. God, to Stephen, is a cry on the soccer field. Deasy also believes in the value of form, money and even words. He can put meaning ‘in a nut shell’ where I don’t think Stephen could so easily trust words, they are mutable, like the past.
Money is something to be kept, to be put away, to Deasy. They are just empty shells in Stephen’s pocket. All of these objects, the spoon, the painting, the books, the money, they are symbols of ‘beauty and power’ to Deasy, but the are just a lump in Stephen’s pocket, symbols tainted by greed and misery.