Have I ever mounted a bicycle from the right?
No, and I do not recall seeing anyone else do it. “Why do you ask?” I ask myself.
Blame it on The Third Policemen—specifically, the fecund imagination (or is it boundless wisdom?) of Sergeant Pluck. Let us pick up the thread as he discusses certain peculiarities of Policeman Fox, who has yet to appear in the story, and the fundamental problem of right versus left:
‘I think he has an opinion that there is a turn to the right down the road and likely that is what he is after, he thinks the best way to find it is to die and get all the leftness out of his blood. I do not believe there is a right-hand road and if there is it would surely take a dozen active men to look after the readings alone, night and morning. As you are perfectly aware the right is much more tricky than the left, you would be surprised at all the right pitfalls there are. We are only at the beginning of our knowledge of the right, there is nothing more deceptive to the unwary.’
Naturally, our narrator is as baffled as we are, but it all becomes clear, if mud is such:
‘I did not know that.’
The Sergeant opened his eyes wide in surprise.
‘Did you ever in your life,’ he asked, ‘mount a bicycle from the right?’
‘I did not.’
‘And why?’
‘I do not know. I never thought about it.’
He laughed at me indulgently.
‘It is nearly an insoluble pancake,’ he smiled, ‘a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.’ (The Third Policeman, Ch. 10)
It is hard not to think of this pancake every morning and every evening as I mount my bicycle. Is this a universal truth, an eternal verity that has been hiding in plain sight my whole life?
Because our species is designed to seek patterns and/or meaning in what we encounter, the thought floated upward: maybe this predilection predates the machine age. Did I ever see a person mount a horse from the right? No, not in any movie or television show, as far as I can recall. My experience with real-life horse mounting is scant—I did mount and ride a pony at Uncle Jack’s farm in Chardon, Ohio, when I was a kid, and my siblings did as well, all from the left, I would bet but cannot, of course, be 100% sure. One of my brothers is left-handed, yet he almost certainly mounted from the left as the rest of us did.
What does this mean, if true? What does it mean in any case? I do not know, even after thinking about it.
