Finished #TheThirdPoliceman
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‘You have no idea where you are going…’
‘No, none.’
‘Nor have I…Sometimes I think that perhaps I might become part of…the world…if you understand me?’
‘I know.’
‘I mean- the wind…Or perhaps something to do with the sea…Or the smell of a flower…’
I enjoyed reading #TheThirdPoliceman with you! It took some digging (and an audiobook) to help understand the book, but it was well worth it. #OBrien25 Thank you @paperpills10.bsky.social !
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‘I think,' he said, 'we will go out and have a look at it, it is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.'
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'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked.
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'It's my teeth, we heard him say abstractedly and half-aloud. Nearly every sickness is from the teeth.
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‘To spend it and spin it out and not have all of it forever unused inside him.'
'All what?'
' His lifetime. He wants to get rid of as much as possible, undertime and overtime, as quickly as he can….’
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When I awoke again two thoughts came into my head so closely together that they seemed to be stuck to one another; I could not be sure which came first and it was hard to separate them and examine them singly.
He dropped his eyes and looked very disconsolate. I am the world's champion gawm,' he murmured.
I could not help smiling at him, not, indeed, without some pity. It was clear that he was not the sort of person to be entrusted with the contents of the black box.
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I stopped thinking, closing up my mind with a snap as if it were a box or a book. I had a plan in my head which seemed almost hopelessly difficult, very nearly beyond the extremity of human effort, desperate.
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the nearness of my own house, the nearer nearness of Courahans, Gillespies, Cavanaghs, and the two Murrays, and not further than a shout away the cottage of big Joe Siddery, the giant black-smith. Perhaps whoever had the light may have found the black
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How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the responses she gave me at every particle of her frame? I that I had known her for many years and that she had me and that we understood each other utterly.
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With a start I realised that I had been communing with this strange companion and not only that conspiring with her. Both of us were afraid of the same Sergeant, both were awaiting the punishments he would bring with him on his return
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I was awakened the following morning by sounds of loud hammering outside the window and found myself immediately recalling- the recollection was an absurd paradox- that I had been in the next world yesterday.
Screenshot of my timeline just now, with Barbara's post of the "If you have no name..." quote from The Third Policeman above a quote-post of Joshua Friedman's comment on the NY Times story about the administration's plan to add unwanted legal immigrants to a database of dead people. (Which AIUI would invalidate their social security numbers, freeze their bank accounts and wreak other havoc.)
...or no social security number: here's a sadly apposite juxtaposition from my Bluesky feed just now.
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…I was handed a magnifying glass…I looked at my hand through it and saw nothing that was recognizable…MacCruiskeen took it back with a smile at my puzzled eye.
'It magnifies to invisibility,' he explained.
Or perhaps something to do with the sea. The light that never was on sea or land, the peasant's hope and the poet's dream. A big wave in mid-ocean, for instance, it is a very lonely and spiritual thing. Part of that.
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Or perhaps something to do with the sea. The light that never was on sea or land, the peasant's hope and the poet's dream. A big wave in mid-ocean, for instance, it is a very lonely and spiritual thing. Part of that.
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To quote a well-known poet, even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer'. Besides, unconcern in the face of death is in itself the most impressive gesture of defiance.
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As you are perfectly aware the right is much more tricky than the left, you would be surprised at all the right pitfalls there are. We are only at the beginning of our knowledge of the right, there is nothing more deceptive to the unwary.'
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...he thinks the best way to find it is to die and get all the leftness out of his blood.
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A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely.
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The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimit-ably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. #OBrien25 #TheThirdPoliceman
Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day-mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water.
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‘It does a man no harm,' the Sergeant remarked pleasantly, 'to move around a bit and see things. It is a great thing for widening out the mind. A wide mind is a grand thing….’
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Certainly. I will be there to the end. In the meantime let us make up our minds that eternity is not up a lane that is found by looking at cracks in the ceiling of a country policeman's bedroom.
Briefly he indicates that the happy state is 'not unassociated with water' and that 'water is rarely absent from any wholly satisfactory situation'.
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‘But there is a road there,' the Sergeant said triumphantly, 'if you know how to look knowledgeably for it. And a very old road. Come with me till we see the size of it.'
‘Is this the road to eternity?'
‘It is indeed but there is no signpost.'
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I felt sure I was not going against the road. It was, so to speak, accompanying me.
'Now a magnifying glass is a better thing because you can look at it and what you see when you look is a third thing altogether.’
A clue?
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