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.
There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.
Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.
I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.
The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.
We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
You can't have a value structure without a hierarchy. They're the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.
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