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Re: a sliver of light in-between two eternities of darkness."
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----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 12:05:55 -0500
From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
Exactly. It points up the primary difference in these two writers: VN with his
rich sense of life, all it's beauty and all it's possibilities, which, for all
one knows, could extend far beyond the grave. And Beckett, basically a
nihilist, a poetic nihilist, sometimes approaching beauty in his expressions of
lostness, but essentially a no-hoper.
I was a big Beckett fan before meeting Lolita. Since reading VN, Beckett has
become almost unreadable.
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 7:42 PM
Subject: Fwd: Re: a sliver of light in-between two eternities of darkness."
----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 16:53:39 EST
From: In a message dated 29/01/2005 18:49:59 GMT Standard Time,
STADLEN@aol.com writes:
> I'm grateful to Carolyn for providing the reference to Beckett. VNs phrase
> had always sung in my head with on odd familiarity. But I had read Godot
> about 20 years before reading Speak, and could never place it. I think,
> though, that the image or idea has a much earlier provenance and probably is
> one of the universal thoughts or images. Isn't a similar image in Beowulf,
> with a bird flying in one window of the mead hall and then flying out a
> window on the other side?
>
I had long noticed the similarity, but also the difference. VN's image is
oddly imprecise: is the cradle floating, or is it on the ledge of a cliff, for
instance? Whereas Beckett's image of a woman giving birth astride a grave is
all
too precise, very nasty in fact.
Anthony Stadlen
----- End forwarded message -----
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In a message dated 29/01/2005 18:49:59 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu
writes:
I'm grateful to Carolyn for providing the reference to Beckett. VNs phrase
had always sung in my head with on odd familiarity. But I had read Godot
about 20 years before reading Speak, and could never place it. I think,
though, that the image or idea has a much earlier provenance and probably is
one of the universal thoughts or images. Isn't a similar image in Beowulf,
with a bird flying in one window of the mead hall and then flying out a
window on the other side?
I had long noticed the similarity, but also the difference. VN's image is
oddly imprecise: is the cradle floating, or is it on the ledge of a cliff, for
instance? Whereas Beckett's image of a woman giving birth astride a grave is
all too precise, very nasty in fact.
Anthony Stadlen
----- End forwarded message -----