The sky above is devoured and empty. Presently it is there and does not bring any salvation. The earth beneath is hell. Even believers are no longer convinced that they genuinely believe. It is their only conviction that they should believe. Man wanders around like a lonely refugee searching for lost meaning. In all its nonsensicality. His only certainty is his own suffering. Not being born would be even better. But now that he is here, in the spiritual wasteland devoid of any hope and virtue, alone and lonely, powerless and lost, he keeps seeking, if not a way out, then at least his final annihilation.
His body is hungry for other bodies, his heart is hungry for love and blood, his soul is crying out enviously for the unattainable heaven of salvation. He has not come for hope, he is not after healing. He is after a confirmation that his traumatic wounds are incurable.
He has come to seal off his anxiety. To be satiated, at least for a moment, in the lost world of darkness and the unbearableness of being, to take comfort, to catch a short breath, a small pleasure squashed inside great horror. He has come to yearn. To seek courage for the fire of the spirit and the power of the heart among doubt and fear. To find that unreachable land in which to live better. For human longing, however, cannot be killed. It is the only thing that sustains and persecutes him all the time, all his life.
So, in this world Beckett’s hero has nothing but the awareness of his own nothingness – mere chance can take everything away from him – but he still has the power to say »I«. With his feet in the mud and with the eternally non-attainable sky, he travels towards his inevitable self-destruction.
Diego de Brea