“Sad Sam Beckett”
Leonard concludes his collection with a very strange (maybe
appropriately so, given the subject?) sort of eulogy for Samuel (“Sam” he calls
him throughout) Beckett. Beckett died in 1989. Leonard doesn’t really have much to say about Beckett’s
work, but gives us a brief, interesting walk through Beckett’s idiosyncrasies
with five short sections each introduced by a quotation from one of Beckett’s
works. The final quote is from Endgame,
“Do you believe in life to come? Mine was always that.”
Leonard sums up the writer by telling us “I think Beckett’s
just weird…The masters of modernism are almost always weirder than anybody they
write about or for.”
Last lines of the essay (and the collection), “Lighten up,
Sam [Beckett]. It’s only the end of the world.”
New word: scrofula = tuberculosis
New
learning: Beckett “lived for forty years in the same Paris apartment with a
wife “…to whom he communicated only on the telephone.”
Godot:
Godot:
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