The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the relationship between movement, mortality, and how one's experiences shape them over time.
In this thought-provoking quote, Flann O'Brien suggests that the act of walking not only changes our physical state but also affects our essence, as if we are accumulating elements of the road we traverse. He metaphorically links the journey to life itself, hinting at the interplay between movement, existence, and the inevitable nature of death, questioning the best way to navigate through both our physical and metaphorical journeys.
In practice
During a meditation session, one could use this quote to reflect on the metaphorical implications of life experiences.
After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?" I felt pleased again. He was now questioning me. "What?" "That No is a better word than Yes," he replied.
When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.
Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places.
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.
Thoughtfulness is the way to deathlessness, thoughtlessness the way to death. The thoughtful do not die: the thoughtless are as if dead already.
The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing.
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
Out of the experience of extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.
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