Monthly Archives: November 2011

I feel myself moving away from ideas of poverty and bareness. They are still superlatives. […] There is not having and there is not being able to, perhaps too much of a tendency to think of them as standing together. The poor are able to, rather. Not even poor, that is what we have to bear, not even poor and yet not able to. If there were even one specific thing that we were not able to do, but we do not know what there is that could be done. But you are only too familiar with these elaborations; old no doubt as sadness. And that we cannot follow either, from weakness of mind. How weak it must be, not to be able to follow that! Treasures of poverty, maybe; but of impotence, no, we shall do without treasures. We shall always have enough to keep living, in ignorance and weakness, really without pride, enough to keep living, right down to the most grotesque details, beyond our strength. Not without joy, this observation that every effort is the story of a collapse, it is really restful. That there are superior minds (no irony) which know and are able to, I can readily grant. But when one is not gifted, really stupid and clumsy, what is one to go in for? Cunning? Art? Keeping quiet? Silence will come soon enough, not from pride, but from weariness of speech.

— Beckett, letter to Georges Duthuit, 1950

Vladimir: The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?

— Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Then I started to go and as I went I heard her singing another song, or perhaps more verses of the same, fainter and fainter the further I went, then no more, either because she had come to an end or because I was gone too far to hear her. To have to harbour such a doubt was something I preferred to avoid, at that period. I lived of course in doubt, on doubt, but such trivial doubts as this, purely somatic as some say, were best cleared up without delay, they could nag at me like gnats for weeks on end. So I retraced my steps a little way and stopped. At first I heard nothing, then the voice again, but only just, so faintly did it carry. First I didn’t hear it, then I did, I must therefore have begun hearing it, at a certain point, but no, there was no beginning, the sound emerged so softly from the silence and so resembled it. When the voice ceased at last I approached a little nearer, to make sure it had really ceased and not merely been lowered. Then in despair, saying, No knowing, no knowing, short of being beside her, bent over her, I turned on my heel and went, for good, full of doubt.

— Beckett, ‘First Love‘