April 2018

Samuel Beckett

About the Author

In Celebration of 112 years of Samuel Beckett We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression that we exist Excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah, that’s a good one All life long the same questions, the same answers Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) My mother, I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of [my mother] who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit. Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951) Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1986) It is wrong to think of Beckett as having a simple philosophical message and especially not a bleak one. Rather Beckett’s experience is of a world lacking any overall, final meaning. It is not even, as Hobbes asserted, that life is nasty, brutish and short. Rather, it simply goes on. Beckett remains fascinated with the way life continues: What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company... Life ticks on through the boredom of youth and the loneliness of old age. But in all that tedium, there is, especially in the novels and plays in Beckett an almost manic, exulting, joy. Life is like that. Take it or leave it. But enjoy the joke. Excerpt from Dermot Moran’s Beckett and Philosophy (2006)