Love story: “[A]ll is dross […] that is not Miss Dwyer.” / Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Ellimann, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs West of Passage, who loved Neary. (p.7.) Cf. infra: No sooner had Miss Dwyer, despairing of recommending herself to Flight-Lieutenant Ellimann, made Neary as happy as a man could desire, than she became one with the ground with which she figured so prettily. Neary wrote to Herr Kurt Koffka demanding an explanation. He had not yet received an answer. / The problem now became how to break with the morsel of chaos without hurting its feelings. The plaisir de rompre, for Murphy the rationale of social contacts, was alien to Neary. He insisted, by word and deed, that he was not worthy of her, a hackneyed device that had the desired effect. And it was not long before Miss Dwyer had made Flight-Lieutenant Ellimann, despairing of recommending himself to Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, as happy as a Flight-Lieutenant could desire. (p.31.)

His honourable independence was based on an understanding with his landlady, in pursuance of which she sent exquisitely [cr]ooked accounts to Mr Quigley and handed over the difference, less a reasonable commission, to Murphy. This superb arrangement enabled him to consume away at pretty well his own gait, but was inadequate for a domestic establishment, no matter how frugal. (p.15.)

He [Murphy] closed his eyes and fell back. It was not his habit to make out cases for himself. An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless than Murphy defending his courses of inaction, as he did not require to be told. He had been carried away by his passion for Celia and by a most curious feeling that he should not collapse without at least the form of a struggle. This grisly relic from the days of nuts, balls and sparrows astonished himself. To die fighting was the perfect antithesis of his whole practice, faith and intention. […] The tone was that adopted by exhibitionists for their last words on earth. Celia sat on the bed. He opened his eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, and with great magical ability sunk their shafts into hers, greener than he had ever seen them and more hopeless than he had ever seen anybody’s./ “What have I now,” he said. “I distinguish. You, my body, and my mind.” He paused for this monstrous proposition to be granted. Celia did not hesitate, she might never have occasion to grant him anything again. “In the merchantile gehennea,” he said, “to which your words [26] invite me, one of these will go, or two, or all. If you only; if my body, then you also; if my mind, then all. Now?” / She looked at him helplessly. He seemed serious. But he had seemed serious when he spoke of putting on his gems and lemon, etc. She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time. / “You twist everything,” she said. “Words needn’t mean any of that.” (pp.26-27).

Life-syndrome: “Do not quibble,’ said Neary. “You saved my life, now palliate it.” / “I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.” (p.36.)

Bit of strife?: The thought of going to London was distasteful to Neary for a number of reasons, of which by no means the least cogent was the presence there of his second deserted wife. Strictly speaking this woman, née Cox, was not his wife, and he owed her no duty, since his first deserted wife was alive and well in Calcutta. But the lad in Loondon did not take this view and neither did her legal advisers. Wylie knew something of this position. (p.38.)

Musical obstetrics: His troubles had begun early. To go back no farther than the vagitus, it had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 double vibrations per second, but the double flat of his. How he winced, the honest obstetrician, a devout member of the old Dublin Orchestral Society and an amateur flautist of some merit. With what sorrow he recorded that of all the millions of little largynges cursing in unions at that particular moment, the infant Murphy’s alone was off the note. (p.44)

Murphy’s chair: At this moment Murphy would willingly have waived his expectation of Antepurgatory for five minures in his chair, renounced the [47] lee of Belacqua’s rock and his embryonal repose, looking down at dawn across the reeds ot the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose, immune from expiation until he should have dreamed it all through again, with the downright dreaming of an infant, from the spermarium to the crematorium. He thought so highly of this post-mortem situation, its adgantages were present in such detial to his mind, that he actually hoped he might live to be old. Then he would have a long time lying there dreaming, wathcing the dayspring run thorugh its zodiac, befoer the toil up hill to Paradise. The gradient was outrageous, one in less than one. God grant no godl chandler would shorten his time with a good prayer. […] This was his Belacqua fantasy and perhaps the most systematised in the whole collection. It belonged to those that lay just beyond the frontiers of suffering, it was the first landscape of freedom. (p.48.)

Ticklepenny [Austin Clarke:] was immeasurably inferior to Neary in every way, but they had certain points of contrast with Murphy in common. One was this pretentious fear of going mad. Another was the inability to look on, no matter what the spectacle. These were connected, in the sense that the painful situation could always be reduced to onlooking of one kind or another. But even here Neary was superior to Ticklepenny, at least according to the tradtion that ranks the competitor’s spirit higher than the huckster’s and the man regretting what he cannot have higher than the man sneering at what he cannot understand. For Neary knew his great master’s figure of the three lives, whereas Ticklepenny knew nothing. (p.54.) Murphy also was inclined to think that the arrangement would find immediate favour, assuming Ticklepenny had concealed no material factor in the situation, such as a liaison with some high official, the head nurse for example. Short of being such a person’s minion, Murphy was inclined to think there was nothing Ticklepenny could do that he could not do a great deal better, espeically in a society of psychotics, and that they had merley to appear together before the proper authority for this to be patent. (p.55).

Murphy’s law: the freedom of indifference, the indifference of freedom... He therefore... disconnected his mind from the gross importunities of sensation and reflection and composed himself on the hollow of his back for the torpor he had been craving to enter for the past five hours. [61 […] nothing can stop me now, was his last thought before he lapsed into consciousness […] he slipped away, from the pensums and prizes […] to where there were no pensums and prizes, but only Murphy, improved out of all knowledge [62].

Murphy’s mind: pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising to actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universie inside it. / This did not involve Murphy in the idealistic tar. There was the mental fact and there was the physical fact, equally real if not equally pleasant. / He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless yearning for form, but a sbetween that of which he had both mental and physical experince and that of which he had mental experience only. Thus the form of kick ws actual, that of caress virtual. [63 /] The mind felt its actual part to be aove and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo. The mental experience was cut off from the physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the agreement of part of its contents with physical fact did not confer worth on that part. It did not function and could not be disposed according to a principle of worth. It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. It contained forms with parallel in anothe mode and forms without, but not right forms and wrong forms. I felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was not to be in the light, no in the half light, now in the dark. That was all. / Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed the other. He neither though a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one. Perhaps the knowledge was related to the fact of the kick as two magnitudes to a third. Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-mental non-physical Kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick in intellectum and the kick in re. But where then was the supreme Caress? [/ ...] Any solution would do that did not clash with the feeling, growing stronger as Murphy grew older, that his mind was a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its own, self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body. Of infinitely more interest that how this came to be so was the manner in which it might be exploited. (p.63-64.)

[Further:] It is most unfortunate, but the point in this story has been reached where a justification of the expression ‘Murphy’s mind’ has to be attempted. Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was - that would an extravagance and an impertinence - but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be. Murphy’s mind is after all the gravamen of these informations. A short section to itself at this stage will relieve us from the necessity of apologising for it further. (Faber & Faber, 2000, p.69.)

Miss Counihan: For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite anthropoid [..]. How far this constitutes an advantage is what every man must decide for himself. [69]; Miss Counihan, an omnivorous reader [of pulp fiction] [69; note also, she had taken out her leaving certificate, 147]. […] When the effort of shedding tears finally became greater than the pleasure of having them kissed away, Miss Counihan discontinued it. [72]; Wylie, intelligent enough to thank his stars he was not more so, saw his mistake in defending Murphy and attacking Neary. A man could no more work a workman out of position on her own ground of sentimental lech than he could outsmell a dog. Her instinct was a menstruum, resolving every move he made, immediately and without effort, into its final implications for her vanity and interest. The only points at which Miss Counihan was vulnerable were her erogenous zones and her need for Murphy. He engaged a rapid skirmish with the former... [73] still loved her enough to enjoy cutting the tripes out of her occasionally [81]; For Miss Counihan was not one of those delights peculiar to London, with which he proposed to indulge himself up to the hilt and the utmost of her liberality. It was only in Dublin, where the profession had gone to the dogs, that Miss Counihan could stand out as the object of the desire of a man of taste. If Neary had not been cured of her by London he was less than a man, or more of a saint. Turf is compulsory in the Saorstat, but one need not bring a private supply to Newcastle [111]. Standing in profile against the blazing corridor, with her high buttocks and her low breasts, she looked not merely queenly, but on for anything [123]; suddenly tired of holding Miss Counihan’s hands at precisely the same moment as she did […] a merciful coincidence. [125].

Murphy’s demise: He drew up the ladder, lit the dip sconced in its own grease on the floor and tied himself up in the chair, dimly intending to have a short rock and then, if he felt any beter, to dress and go, before the day staff were about, leaving Ticklepenny to face the music, music, MISUC, back to Brewery Road, to Celia, serenade, nocturne, albada. […] At one of the rock’s dead points he saw, for a second, far beneath, the dip and radiator, gleam and frin; at the other the skylight, open to no starts […] The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the gleam was gone, the grin was gone, the starlessness was gone, soon his body would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower and then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be quiet, soon he would be free. / The gas went on in the wc, excellent gas, superfine chaos. / Soon his body was quiet. [142; Faber edn. 2009, p.158]; modus morendi, a classic case of misadventure [147]; With regard to the disposal of these my body, mind and soul, I desire that they be burnt and placed in a paper bag and brought to the Abbey theatre, Lr. Abbey Street, Dublin, and without pause in what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit, and I desire that the chain be there pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece, the whole to be executed without ceremony or show of grief. [151] [Cooper takes the ashes to a pub:] By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon... [and] swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit. [154]; There was no shorter way home […] the levers were the tired heart. (For more extensive extract, see infra.)

The MMM: There were no facts in the M.M.M. except those sanctioned by the doctor. Thus, to take a simple example, when a patient died suddenly and flagrantly, as was sometimes bound to happen even in the M.M.M., let him assume nothing of the kind when sending for the doctor. No patient was dead till the doctor had seen him. (Faber Edn., 2009, pp.100-01.)

Irish literature: grave of Fr. Prout [32]; Austin Ticklepenny [52]... his steady pentameter per pint is now degraded to the position of a male nurse in a hospital for the better-class mentally deranged [52] a distinguished indigent drunken Irish bard [53]; dispopathic discipline... whose breakdown had been due less to the pints than to the pentameters... felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rhymes) and at the caesura as hard and fast as his own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor of gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish’s porter... Olympian sot... reverted to temperate potboy [53]; Mary Magdalen Mercyseat [53]; It is always pleasant to leave this country [Ireland] [75]; The turf was truly Irish in its eleutheromania, it would not burn behind bars. [75; Cf., Turf is compulsory in the Saorstat, but one need not bring a private supply to Newcastle, 111]; Gilmigrim jokes […] from Lilliputian wine... dream of Descartes linoleum... [81] Cf. fools and knaves & same old Wood’s halfpence [97] [Ticklepenny compares Murphy to Clarke in a three-week catatonic stupor, 109]; They never quite kill the thing they love lest their instinct for artificial respiration should go abegging. [114]; The skill is really extraordinary wiht which analphabetes, especially those of Irish education, circumvent their dread of verbal commitments. Now Cooper’s face, though it did not seem to move a muscle, brought together and three off in a single grimace the finest shades of irresolution, revulsion, doglike devotion, catlike discretion, fatigue, hunger, thirst and reserves of strength, in a very small fraction of time that the finest oratory would require for a greatly inferior evasion, and without exposing its proprietor to misquotation. [115]; Groves of Blarney [126]; the ruins of the ruins of a broth of a boy [126]. […] return to the dear land of our birth, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the - er - fens, the -er - glens, by tonight’s train. [152]