Selected quotations

- Did you ever study the Mollycule Theory when you were a lad? he asked.

Mick said no, not in any detail.

-That is a very serious defalcation and an abstruse exacerbation, he said severely, but I'll tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small mollycules of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other various routes too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. Do you follow me intelligently? Mollycules?

-I think I do.

-They are as lively as twenty punky leprechauns doing a jig on top of a flat tombstone. Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around doing intricate convulsions inside the baste. What else is it but that?

-That would be bound to make the sheep dizzy, Mick observed, especially if the whirling was going on inside the head as well. The sergeant gave him a look which no doubt he himself would describe as one of non-possum and noli-me-tangere.

-That's a most foolhardy remark, he said sharply, because the nerve-strings and the sheep's head are whirling into the same bargain and you can cancel out one whirl against another and there you are - like simplifying a division sum when you have fives above and below the bar.

-To say the truth I did not think of that.

-Mollycules is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra but you would want to take it by degrees with rulers and cosines and familiar other instruments and then at the wind-up not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened you would have to go back over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures exactly as delineated by Hall & Knight's algebra and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole pancake properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hurting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in the middle of the bed.

-Very true, Mick decided to say.

-If you hit a rock hard enough and often enough with an iron hammer, some mollycules of the rock will go into the hammer and contrariwise likewise.

-That is well known, he agreed.

-The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the mollycules of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in country parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.

Mick made a little gasp of astonishment that made a sound like the air coming from a bad puncture.

-Good Lord, I suppose you're right.

-And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that serenely partake of humanity.

The Dalkey Archive