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“something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall.”
“A few times, so to shape, I chanced to be stretching, in the shadow as I thought, the liferight out of myself in my ericulous imaginating…and I swear my gots how that I'm not meself at all, no jolly fear, when I realize bimiselves how becomingly I to be going to become.”
“He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm….He lifts the lifewand and the dumbspeak.”
In 1967 a young woman, Sighle Kennedy, was working on her dissertation about the work of Samuel Beckett. She wrote him a letter, asking him to evaluate the validity of her thesis. Beckett wrote a short note back that included the following sentence: “If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work, my points of departure would be the‘Naught is more real…’and the‘Ubi nihil vales …’both already in Murphy and neither very rational” (Kennedy, 1971, p. 300). The first quotation appears on page 138 of Murphy (1938), where the narrator describes Murphy losing consciousness after his game of chess with Mr. Endon. The full sentence is: “Not the numb peace of their own suspension [the senses], but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the