Re: Cycling quotation


Paul Turner wrote:
> I may be stretching the bounds of miscellaneous here, but I ran across a
> bicycle-related passage last night and thought maybe someone else might
> enjoy as much as I did the description of a city of joyful people on
> bikes. It's from the journalist A.J. Liebling's description of Paris after
> the liberation:


That was beautiful. I enjoyed that. Thanks much for sharing. But I can
relate to the following by Mark Twain, because last night, I was
riding, and I FELL ON MY ASS!!!! I have learned much, but I have yet to
learn how to FALL. There must be a proper way to fall, but I have yet
to figure it out.

The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them very badly.
In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me,
and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to
say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and
breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and
unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other
way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been
the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in
ignorance; they knew nothing - nothing which it could profit them to
know. For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the
tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so
violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite
thing - the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are
falling. It is hard to believe this, when you are told it. And not
merely hard to believe it, but impossible; it is opposed to all your
notions. And it is just as hard to do it, after you do come to believe
it. Believing hard to do it, after you do come to believe it. Believing
it, and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is true, does not
help it: you can't any more DO it than you could before; you can
neither force nor persuade yourself to do it at first. The intellect
has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard
their old education and adopt the new.


Maggie. Falling in all directions ;-)

.

Relevant Pages

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