In 1952, in his play "Waiting For Godot," Samuel Beckett has a
furious Pozzo exclaim: "They give birth astride of a
grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more" echoing
Nabokov's opening lines in "Speak Memory" (1951): "The
cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but
a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
Two years later, in
"The Expelled," Samuel Beckett reconsiders graves and
stairs: "There were not many
steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but
the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one
with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step,
and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn't count. At the top of the steps
I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to
bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to
begin nor where to end, that's the truth of the matter[...] In what
just happened to me there was nothing in the least memorable. It was neither the
cradle nor the grave of anything whatever. Or rather it resembled so many other
cradles, so many other graves, that I'm lost."
These sentences
reminded me of Nabokov's childhood confusion in relation to his and his
brother's ages (he was born close to the turn of the century, in 1899). This
muddle is reiterated in "Pale Fire," when Kinbote gets wrong his own age and
John Shade's and, most importantly, in connection to John Shade's last lines.
Anyway, how must we count the days, steps or verses that lie in the
interval between the cradle and the grave? *
...................................................................................................
* - In "Ada, or Ardor" we are
invited to consider that "the only thing that hints at a
sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap
between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement,
but in between, something like true Time lurks. How can I extract it from its
soft hollow?" and "when working on his Texture of
Time, Van found... proof of real time’s being connected with the interval
between events, not with their ‘passage,’ not with their blending, not with
their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time
transpires."