I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.
And I am perhaps confusing several different occasions, and different times, deep down, and deep down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down, somewhere between the mud and the scum.
Then much, then little, then nothing.
That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation—Time.
And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again.... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? Then I might escape being gnawed to death.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it. VLADIMIR.
There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.
Birth was the death of him.
Enough, it's time it ended, in the refuge too. And yet I hestitate, I hestitate to… to end. Yes, there it is, it's time it ended and yet I hestitate to – (he yawns) – to end.
At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.
I always thought old age would be a writer's best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory's gone, all the old fluency's disappeared. I don't write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It's a lie!' So I know I was right. It's the best chance I've ever had.
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.
So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light.
This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
The inspection once completed it is usual to put everything carefully back in place as far as possible. It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence.
You can't have everything, I've often noticed it.
We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.
Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.
ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? VLADIMIR: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. Is there really nothing new to try? I mentioned my hope, but it is not serious. If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing?
I suppose we blathered.
With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. In a way. I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . me.
This was indeed a merciful coincidence, was it not, that at the moment of Watt's losing sight of the ground floor, he lost interest in it also.
The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
It is by the nadir that we come, said Watt, and it is by the nadir that we go, whatever that means. And the artist must have felt something of this kind too, for the circle did not turn, as circles will, but sailed steadfast in its white skies, with its patient breach for ever below.
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything. The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing.
The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing—once she would have noticed these things.
Ever Tried Ever Failed No Matter Try Again Fail Again Fail Better.
Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.
The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.
To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks look all alike.
And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.
So that I would have hesitated to exclaim, with my finger up my arse-hole for example, Jesus Christ, it's much worse than yesterday, I can hardly believe it is the same hole.
Do we mean love, when we say love?
It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.
My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.
Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
Dance first. Think later. Its the natural order! Or at least its mine anyways.
Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.
There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.
But is it true love, in the rectum?
Words are all we have.
Was I asleep? Had I slept?
