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.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are "being lived".
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?
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