On this day, January 7, in 1938
Then, echoing the random absurdism of his novel, on 7 January 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed in a Paris street when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp, named “Prudent”. Joyce arranged for medical treatment, and Beckett received his page proofs in hospital where he made a few alterations and insertions. https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2024/07/24/murphy-by-samuel-beckett-1938-the-maestro-of-failure/
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at xxx parts per million.
As of 2026 they are ppm at and rising rapidly. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.
Btw, the point(s) of this project is …. the how, the who the hell am I and the what do I currently believe?
The context was
Beckett had been living in Paris for a couple of years by this time, I think. He’d been under analysis with Wilfrid Bion (watch this space)
Why care?
Well, knowing this about an author can change the way you read them? (Some say it shouldn’t, obvs – nothing outside the text blah blah).
(How) does it connect to climate change?
Beckett’s sense of the absurd, despair, but also ACTION.
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
What happened next
He kept despairing and going on.
How does it help us understand the world?
Oof. Beckett and Bion – I must really get on with that…
How does it help us act in the world?
Beckett’s sense of the absurd, despair, but also ACTION.
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
There was the Austrian playwright, Otto Von Horvath who died in Paris on June 1 1938 when a branch of a tree fell on his head, as I recall, about the same time, pre war. Paris, of course, people didn’t know it was pre war, necessarily. They had a fairly good guess but didn’t know it was “pre-occupation Paris”, (see what I did there?)
. I presume a lot of them had a mental model that it would be a rerun of World War One, only with bigger explosions.
Anyway, Sword of Damocles in it all our lives are hanging by a thread/ending of Stand by Me by the late great Rob Reiner
The source that it comes from, if necessary,
Xxx
The other things that you could read about this or watch
I should read the Molloy trilogy – I stared Malone Dies without realising it’s mid…
What do you think?
If you have opinions or info about this, or other things that happened on this day that are worth knowing, let me know!
Also on this day