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[TRIVIA] Beckett's and Nabokov's graves and stairs.
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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? *
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* - 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."
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