I finished reading Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable – on the beach beside a small lake in rural Vermont. It had taken me the better part of two years to read the 414 pages of the Grove Edition, not because I wasn’t taken with Beckett’s obsessions but because I was forced to savour his intensity in small doses. The complexity of those internal worlds was not something I could appreciate in all moods. Beckett is, if nothing else, and here especially, unrelenting.
So it was I took the book on vacation. ( “Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.”) I found myself in the most common of situations, with wife and son on a summer beach crowded with other vacationers and locals. I read the last thirty pages there, but the rest of the book was still with me, I had lived and breathed its tortured, honest passages, its profound meditations on death and existence. When I came to the last lines – “… it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – I was deeply touched by Beckett’s complete openness and humanity, his willingness to express the truth and ambiguity of the human predicament. There among the bathers, the chaotic choir of summer voices, the kids splashing in and out of the water, in the middle of a fine sunny day, I wept, openly and without care, I wept for myself, for those around me, for Beckett himself who felt so deeply, for all humans. I thought about the silence and wept.