Samuel Beckett

A total pessimist, obsessed by the many horrors of world events and especially by man’s cruelty to man and even to animals, Beckett had a negative attitude to our short lives on this planet and our attraction to wars, killing and cruelty and tendency to dominate others. He once said that he had nothing against happiness, but personally had no talent for it.

Walking along the Boulevard du Montparnasse one day, I commented that it was a fine day. He looked at the sky and replied “So far”. When at a cricket match with Harold Hobson, the theatre critic, who had observed, “On a day like this, it makes you glad to be alive”, his reply was, “I wouldn’t go so far as that.”

-- John Calder, "Paris, Beckett and Me" in The Irish Times

Casanova: Lucie (Part 5)

Casanova is at his wit’s end with this Lucie nymphet, and he resolves to tell her that he cannot see her again, as he spends a sleepless, restless night in emotional agony.

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I would have liked to keep the cats inside until seven o'clock, but Pop might return with Lorie before then, making the cats' exit that much more difficult. Man, holding the door open for the cats to run outside, one feels the waves of heat as though one were opening an oven in the midst of some serious baking. That is ugly heat.

It has been a good while since Pop has had anyone over. I think it has been at least a whole two weeks since anyone has spent the night here. That's great for me, of course, yet I know that it is also good for me when Pop enjoys some social life, or else he can become pretty persnickety and overbearing.