Last night, when I fell asleep I found myself by the Molly Malone statue at the base of grafton street. I was to go to the shopping centre at the top of the street.
As I gazed up the street, I saw that it was filled with black and white human-statues, regularly arranged, wearing hideous masks, in an alternating pattern – angels and devils. I could not pass them all, it seemed – they were thronged too thick.
I checked my pocket – I had some change still to spare. And so, I wedged myself up between two human statues at the bottom of the street, and dropped a ten-cent coin into each of their baskets – they looked down at me, smiled, and then turned ninety degrees clockwise, forcing me past the first row of statues.
I progressed further this way, the spaces which I occupied growing smaller and smaller with each progression – I began to panic, but pressed on. Just a little beyond Bewley’s, my change ran out: I was trapped.
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As an aside, someone should do something about all those fricking moving statues on grafton street during the day; they’re becoming almost as much of an annoyance as the nighttime gauntlet of guitarplaying/songsinging types that I have had to brave on several occasions.
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And some De Quincey, as promised:
…people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject. The artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much animation.
from “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”.