Are You There, Blog? It's Me. . .

I spent a delightful, long overdue evening with JG, seeing Waiting for Godot. I was never a Beckett fan until I read his seminal work in college. I wrote a kick ass paper on it. I thought, and felt silly thinking (as I have yet to enter the third decade of my little life), that this is a play that will always resonate differently as one ages. It's the same rule that made true my mother's statement when I was a teenager that listening to Paul Simon is rougher as you grow older; the things he sings about, romantic when heard from adolescence, painful in adulthood. In Godot, life is "exactly as it is," but that "is" to Beckett means the essence of life, a life in which relationships are infertile, directions are arbitrary, and speech doesn't necessarily identify a particular speaker. Stripped down to an essence, life becomes inconceivably complex. Time waits for no man, but man is continually lingering around, about, and for time. There is no potential for change in Godot; the only change is from morning to night, and even then, there is no sunset, only a rapid shift into darkness--only the essence of night, not its gradations. The sunset is what we live for, but what Vlad and Etstragon must live without. Essence does away with the symbolic day's end, therefore making day to day existence strangled by a sort of binary on/off system that won't work. As JG would say, "blech." At least Gristedes came through with some superfluity that makes life worth living.