On Beckett
Perhaps we’ll all burst forth Samuel Becketts one day:
En attendant, Beckett writes self-admittedly “pestilential” letters about waiting. In Dublin, he records the “fruitless retreat from Monday to Friday and then the degrading cotton wool interpolation of the weekend” and acknowledges that he’s “more than ever frightened by the prospect of effort, initiative & even the little self-assertion of getting about from one place to another.” In London, he sleeps “more and more — 10 hours at a stretch. I wish it were 20.” In Paris, he is “paralyzed in listlessness” and has “done nothing.”
Certainly describes my year.
Also this:
Laid upon this bare outline, in the course of the letters, is a palimpsest of all the other things that Beckett could have done, or sought to do, but never did. He put in for lectureships at Cape Town and Milan, though with little expectation, or even hope, of success. “Now that I have assembled testimonials,” he wrote of the South African plan, in 1937, “I am in a position to abstain from applying.”
