On Being a Three Man.

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that three is my favourite number, but I suppose I should really confess (because a confessional facility is much to be desired when you have only the wall to talk to) that my interest in the number three has a distinctly obsessive-compulsive hue to it. I’m often conscious of trying to do everything in threes or multiples thereof (although sometimes I will aim, where more practicable, for sevens which probably proves that I’m not as mad as I think I am.) And this is why I was particularly interested in, and impressed by, the final paragraph of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.

He talks about several of the unusual obsessions (should I now consider whether some obsessions are, in fact, entirely usual?) to which humans are prey. The final and most poignant one concerns an obsession with the number three. I quote:

Well known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife ‘goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’

I quote this exactly as printed in the Penguin paperback version. I would have put three more items of punctuation in there, but who’s counting?