Sergeant Pluck on the Tragedy of Atoms

Sergreant Pluck embraces the view that our atoms bounce around and get all mixed up, changing, for example, a man into a bicycle.  Or a man into a horse.  And vice versa:

'My great-grandfather was eighty-three when he died.  For a year before his death he was a horse!'

'A horse?'

'A horse in everything but extraneous externalities.  He would spend the day grazing into a field or eating hay in a stall.  Usually he was lazy and quiet but now and again he would go for a smart gallop, clearing the  hedges in great style.  Did you ever see a man on two legs galloping?'

'I did not.'

'Well, I am given to understand that it is a great sight.  He always said he won the Grand national when he was a lot younger and used to annoy his family with stories about the intricate jumps and the great heights of them.'

'I suppose your great-grandfather got himself into this condition by too much horse riding?'
'Tht was the size of it.  His old horse Dan was in the contrary way and gave so much trouble, coming into the house at night and interfering with young girls during the day and committing indictable offences, that they had to shoot him.  The police were unsympathetic...'

 --Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman 91 (Granada ed. 1985)

Afterthought:  It strikes me that  O'Brien's comedy is somewhat like Chekhov's in that I can see his homeboy audience falling apart in rueful hilarity, saying "Oh God, he's got us to the life" (I remember reading the same thing somewhere about Kafka and the Czechs, though this one seems harder to get the mind around).    With O'Brien, it's the petty vanity, the dreamy arrogance, the self-delusion.  With Chekhov is, well, okay, the same.  Ah, humanity...

The Auld Sod

I've been to Samarkand, but I've never actually set foot in Ireland.  I've long suspected it looks something like this:

I looked carefully around me.  Brown bags and block bogs were arranged neatly on each side of the road with rectangular boxes carved out of them here and there, each wiwth  filling of yellow-brown brown-yellow water.  Far away near the sky tiny people were stooped at their turf-work, cutting out precisely-shaped sods with their patent spades and building them into a tall memorial twice the height of a horse and cart.  Sounds came from them to the Sergeant and myself, delivered to our ears without charge by the west wind, sounds of laughing and whistling and bits of verse from the old bog-songs.  Nearer, a house stood attended by three trees and surrounded by the happiness of a coterie of fowls, all of them picking and rooting and disputating loudly in the unrelenting manufacture of their eggs.   The house was quiet in itself and silent but a canopy of lazy smoke had been erected over the chimney to indicate that people were within engaged on tasks.  Ahead of us went the road, running swiftly across the flat land and pausing slightly to climb slowly up a hill that was waiting for it in a place where there was tall grass, grey boulders and rank stunted trees.  The whole overhead was occupied by the sky, serene, impenetrable, ineffable and incomparable, with a fine island of clouds anchored in the calm two yards to the right of Mr Jarvis's outhouse.

 --Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman 86 (Granada ed. 1985)