Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prodigalwatcher) wrote2006-06-08 03:22 pm
prodigalwatcher) wrote2006-06-08 03:22 pm
Entry tags:
AL - Nothing is Funnier than Unhappiness
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licenseartistic:
Prompt: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett
Ahh, Samuel Beckett. I can remember very well just how bored and frustrated we were with the man during my days at Academy. When it came to literature and the sort of young men with whom I associated in those days, half of the time was spent attempting to memorize Shakespeare sonnets, in typical adolescent attempts to chat up our sister students, and the other half trying to sneak in comic books in between the pages of whatever dusty old tome we'd be reading that week.
Even as adamant as Father was about a good, solid, classical education making the only proper foundation for a decent Watcher, he was still more of the mind that our study hours would have been better spent in the pursuit of more arcane knowledge or in physical training, not reading, as I once heard him refer to Mr. Beckett, "a depressive Irishman with delusions of relevance".
At the time, I couldn't have agreed with Father more, especially not after the torture of a "dramatic reading" of Endgame in our literature classroom. An old man who can't stand, a younger man who can't sit, and two people living in rubbish bins. It was hardly riveting drama for a young man.
Now well on the other side of life from where that callow youth might have expected, and certainly, on the other side of the Atlantic from where he thought he would end up, I find I have a much greater appreciation for Mr. Beckett's work.
In 1938, after having published a few small works and rubbed elbows with such early-century luminaries as James Joyce and Carl Jung, Beckett found himself on the wrong side of a pimp's knife in Paris. He survived the attack and subsequently joined the French resistance in the early days of World War II. After the war was when he produced his most famous works.
Beckett's novels and plays of the time are, essentially, all about the same subject: despair. The characters live in a world that even to the reader or observer make absolutely no sense excepting the fact that things are unrelentingly and apologetically unhappy. Somehow, these poor souls endure.
I trust I don't need to draw every parallel line to my own particular life story for anyone who might read this rumination.
In fact, I dare say that the real world, the one in which I live and breathe and endure, is even more incomprehensible than Hamm and Clov could ever have known. If Mr. Beckett was aware of the truth of the world, of the things kept behind curtains and beneath floor boards, how far into the darkness would his work have gone? Knowing that walking the Earth, all but side-by-side with us frail and fragile humans are demons and vampires and beings of unfathomable power, so many of whom are so exceptionally evil, what's left for a sane man to do but retreat into sadness?
There is, perhaps, one other response of which one might be capable. Fight.
And so, I choose to do so. I choose to fight and stand against the things the rest of the world consider mere frightening myths. I choose to accept the despair of abandonment, the chilling cold of betrayal and the darkness of existence and fight.
And I choose to interpret Mr. Beckett's work to mean that even with the despair and the sadness, that so long as I am willing to endure, somehow, I will find some kind of reward, even if it is simply the knowledge that I am doing right.
"I can't go on, I'll go on."
licenseartistic:Prompt: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett
Ahh, Samuel Beckett. I can remember very well just how bored and frustrated we were with the man during my days at Academy. When it came to literature and the sort of young men with whom I associated in those days, half of the time was spent attempting to memorize Shakespeare sonnets, in typical adolescent attempts to chat up our sister students, and the other half trying to sneak in comic books in between the pages of whatever dusty old tome we'd be reading that week.
Even as adamant as Father was about a good, solid, classical education making the only proper foundation for a decent Watcher, he was still more of the mind that our study hours would have been better spent in the pursuit of more arcane knowledge or in physical training, not reading, as I once heard him refer to Mr. Beckett, "a depressive Irishman with delusions of relevance".
At the time, I couldn't have agreed with Father more, especially not after the torture of a "dramatic reading" of Endgame in our literature classroom. An old man who can't stand, a younger man who can't sit, and two people living in rubbish bins. It was hardly riveting drama for a young man.
Now well on the other side of life from where that callow youth might have expected, and certainly, on the other side of the Atlantic from where he thought he would end up, I find I have a much greater appreciation for Mr. Beckett's work.
In 1938, after having published a few small works and rubbed elbows with such early-century luminaries as James Joyce and Carl Jung, Beckett found himself on the wrong side of a pimp's knife in Paris. He survived the attack and subsequently joined the French resistance in the early days of World War II. After the war was when he produced his most famous works.
Beckett's novels and plays of the time are, essentially, all about the same subject: despair. The characters live in a world that even to the reader or observer make absolutely no sense excepting the fact that things are unrelentingly and apologetically unhappy. Somehow, these poor souls endure.
I trust I don't need to draw every parallel line to my own particular life story for anyone who might read this rumination.
In fact, I dare say that the real world, the one in which I live and breathe and endure, is even more incomprehensible than Hamm and Clov could ever have known. If Mr. Beckett was aware of the truth of the world, of the things kept behind curtains and beneath floor boards, how far into the darkness would his work have gone? Knowing that walking the Earth, all but side-by-side with us frail and fragile humans are demons and vampires and beings of unfathomable power, so many of whom are so exceptionally evil, what's left for a sane man to do but retreat into sadness?
There is, perhaps, one other response of which one might be capable. Fight.
And so, I choose to do so. I choose to fight and stand against the things the rest of the world consider mere frightening myths. I choose to accept the despair of abandonment, the chilling cold of betrayal and the darkness of existence and fight.
And I choose to interpret Mr. Beckett's work to mean that even with the despair and the sadness, that so long as I am willing to endure, somehow, I will find some kind of reward, even if it is simply the knowledge that I am doing right.
"I can't go on, I'll go on."