Just to include in the ‘thoughts on documents’ folder: a really good audio recording of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. A super emotional performance full of a bitter and complicated, even defensive, hope. If the impulse to leave a mark can be a trap, it can also lead to an oddly courageous bravado. The last lines of the play read: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.” It’s not clear how much the character - speaking out of a tape-recorder from the distance of thirty years - really means it, or whether the other character - the same man thirty years later - would agree. But the strategy of asserting one’s will in the direction of things that can’t be changed is so moving - agreeing with the idea of time passing as if time cares.

From UbuWeb.