“Todos los hombres, en algún momento de su vida, se sienten solos; y más: todos los hombres están solos. Vivir, es separarnos del que fuimos para internarnos en el que vamos a ser, futuro extraño siempre. La soledad es el fondo último de la condición humana. El hombre es el único ser que se siente solo y el único que es búsqueda de otro. Su naturaleza —si se puede hablar de naturaleza al referirse al hombre, el ser que, precisamente, se ha inventado a sí mismo al decirle “no” a la naturaleza— consiste en un aspirar a realizarse en otro. El hombre es nostalgia y búsqueda de comunión. Por eso cada vez que se siente a sí mismo se siente como carencia de otro, como soledad.”

“Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

“Beckett was profoundly marked by the horrors of war and Occupation – just how profoundly, the editors point out, is attested by the fact that he did not refer to them anywhere, with the exception of a radio broadcast paying tribute to the work of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô in Normandy, where Beckett was a volunteer in 1945–6: “some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again”. This “vision and sense” and the experiences that gave rise to it, never explicitly touched on, nonetheless haunt everything Beckett subsequently created: worlds in which unexplained disappearances and displacements, systematized cruelty and the eruption of brutal, seemingly unmotivated violence are only to be expected. And, [Dan] Gunn suggests, they haunt his letters too:

“gone – or almost – are the fizzing tirades of the early years, the self-pity, the rancour, the occasional self-indulgent displays of cleverness, almost as if so much suffering had put the cap forever on a merely personal expression of disadvantage or misprision … . As if bitterness had been transmuted into something more deeply reflective: not an acceptance of horror and injustice, but an acceptance of the communality of loss and the reversibility of the roles of victim and persecutor.””

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

“… the story these letters tell, inescapably, is the banal tale of the dream come true, of long labours at last rewarded. And that is one reason they make such good reading. (…) in December of [1950] he is able to tell George Reavey: ‘I have signed a contract with the Editions of Minuit for all work’ and ‘Pretty well certain now that the second play, En attendant Godot, will be put on by Blin at the Noctambules.’

In truth there would be another two frustrated years waiting for finance before Godot premiered on 5 January 1953. Anyone who has read these two volumes of letters will sense at once where the idea of the interminable wait for some life-changing encounter, ever announced, never materialising, perhaps feared as much as hoped, came from. Beckett was now 46 and had been waiting twenty years. ‘Godot himself,’ he later writes, ‘is not of a different species from those he cannot or will not help. I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed.’ A good publisher and a fine director with adequate financial support might have been one, superficial answer to that question.”

“…había creído ingenuamente que venía por otro túnel paralelo al mío, cuando en realidad pertenecía al ancho mundo, al mundo sin límites de los que no viven en túneles; y quizá se había acercado por curiosidad a una de mis extrañas ventanas y había entrevisto el espectáculo de mi insalvable soledad.”

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”