Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-2

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Segment 1

[4544] Anyone else would have lain down in the snow, firmly resolved never
to rise again.
[4545] Not I. [4546] I used to think that men would never get the better
of me.
[4547] I still think I am cleverer than things. [4548] There are men and there
are things, let me have no talk of to hell with animals.
[4549] Nor of []And with with God. [4550] When a thing
resists me, even if it is for my own good, it does not resist me long.
[4551] This snow, for example.

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Segment 2

[4552] Though to tell the truth it lured me more than
it resisted me.
[4553] But in a sense it resisted me. [4554] That was enough. [4555] I
vanquished it, grinding my teeth with joy, it is quite possible to grind
one's incisors.
[4556] I forged my way through it, towards what I would have
called my ruin if I could have conceived what I had left to be ruined.
[4557] Perhaps I have conceived it since, perhaps I have not done conceiving it,
[]it takes time, one is bound to in the end time, I am bound to.

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Segment 3

[4558] But on the way home, a prey
to the maliganancy of man and nature and my own failing flesh, I could not
conceive it.
[4559] My knee, allowance made for the dulling effects of habit,
was neither more nor less painful than the first day.
[4560] The disease,
whatever it was, was dormant!
[4561] How can such a thing[]s be? explained? [4562] But
to return to the flies, I like to think of those that hatch out at the
beginning of winter, within doors, and die shortly after.

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Segment 4

[4563] You see them
crawling and fluttering in the warm corners, puny, sluggish, torpid, mute.
[4564] That is you see an odd one now and then. [4565] They must die very young, without
having been able to lay.
[4566] You sweep them away, you push them into the
dust-pan with the brush, without knowing.
[4567] There is a strange race of
flies.

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Segment 5

[4568] But I was succumbing to other affections, that is not the word,
intestinal for the most part.
[4569] I would have described them once, not now,
I am sorry, it would have been worth reading.
[4570] I shall merely say that
no one else would have surmounted them, without help.
[4571] But I! [4572] Bent double,
my free hand pressed to my belly, I advanced, and every now and then I
let a roar, of triumph and distress.
[4573] Certain mosses I consumed must have

Transcription
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