Rolling Stones

This passage from Molloy is beautiful, it may be my favorite:

This phenomenon, if I remember rightly, was characteristic of my region. Things are perhaps different today. Though I fail to see, never having left my region, what right I have to speak of its characteristics. No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far away. But this feeling was based on nothing serious, it was a simple feeling. For if my region had ended no further than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it changing slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed anything of the kind, but however far I went, and in no matter what direction, it was always the same sky, always the same earth, precisely, day after day and night after night. On the other hand, if it is true that regions gradually merge into one another, and this remains to be proved, than I may well have left mine many times, thinking I was still within it. But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said,
Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wherever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely. It would thus appear, if this is so, that my movements owed nothing to the places they caused to vanish, but were due to something else, to the buckled wheel that carried me, in unforeseeable jerks, from fatigue to rest, and inversly, for example. (60)

This part speaks to the restlessness of Molloy's soul, or of the human soul. Some of us may be constantly searching for something, yet unable to see it right in front of our own eyes. And it is beautiful, because that is life. We will never know the answers, so then it becomes about the journey in searching, and all the discoveries we make along the way, which of course will never answer our original question. We can never escape our own region, only watch it change with time.