We’ve all played silly little games like not stepping on cracks while walking on a sidewalk.
The brilliance of Nobel-laureate Samuel Beckett is that he can turn something so common – in this case, counting steps – into an existential paralysis. Where do you start the count and where does it end?
But counting steps is really just a slapstick distraction. There is something on Beckett’s mind. We aren’t told what but the narrator doesn’t want to think about it. “Memories are killing,” he warns us.
But that’s another problem. We can’t think a thought telling us not to think a thought, that just makes us aware of what it is we don’t want to be aware of.
The solution? Instead of trying to block a thought, let it in. That makes it so commonplace we hardly notice it. 🙂
I am revisiting Beckett’s short prose and finding it just as delightfully absurd, funny, and profound as it was during my first encounter 60 years ago.
The following is a short reading/visualization of the opening paragraph of Samuel Beckett’s “The Expelled,” a story first published in Stories and Texts for Nothing (1954).
