'… marking them up and blocking off passages, sorting them into piles and flagging them with bits of scrap paper or colored ribbon or bubble gum wrappers.'

'In the dark there is emphatically "nothing" to see, although the world is still "there" more obtrusively.'

'Oh I did not say it in such limpid language. And when I say I said, etc., all I mean is that I knew confusedly things were so, without knowing exactly what it was all about. And every time I say, I said this, or, I said that, or speak of a voice saying, far away inside me, Molloy, and then a fine phrase more or less clear and simple, or find myself compelled to attribute to others intelligible words, or hear my own voice uttering to others more or less articulate sounds, I am merely complying with the convention that demands you either lie or hold your peace. For what really happened was quite different. And I did not say, Yet a little while, at the rate things are going, etc., but that resembled perhaps what I would have said, if I had been able. In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and then pretends to be dead. And then sometimes there arose within me, confusedly, a kind of consciousness, which I express by saying, I said, etc., or, Don't do it Molloy, or, Is that your mother's name? said the sergeant, I quote from memory. Or which I express without sinking to the level of oratio recta, but by means of other figures quite as deceitful, as for example, it seemed to me that, etc., or, I had the impression that, etc., for it seemed to me nothing at all, and I had no impression of any kind, but simply somewhere something had changed, so that I too had to change, or the world too had to change, in order for nothing to be changed.'

(—In other words, the transposability of names.)

Snow, snow.

'At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.'

Snow.

'That mythic calendar was more real to Bob Dylan than the everyday calendar that most people were living by.'

When the teacher points at a thing while naming it, showing the child a thing and saying a word, it might seem as if he's doing two things, and thus that an analysis of the things being done results in a certain kind of problem to be solved, understanding how the associative connection between word and thing could enable the child to manage what he must. But why not say the teacher's doing one thing?