One Night
or Day
key
passages
- upper
lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and
drifted. She lay stretched out on
the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze,
water nice and lively. I noticed a
scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless
and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - [pause.] - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits,
because of the glare. I bent over
her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in.
[Pause.] We drifted
in among the flags and stuck. The
way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.]
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on
her. We lay there without
moving. But under us all moved,
and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
- Krapp's Last Tape -
COLLECTED SHORTER
PLAYS of Samuel Beckett
Faber and Faber, London, 1984, pp.61-63
One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself
rise and go. One night or
day. For when his own light went
out he was not left in the dark.
Light of a kind came then from the one high window. Under it still the stool on which till
he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky -
- Stirrings
Still -
BECKETT SHORT No.11
John Calder Publishers, London, 1999, p
7
He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. An old woman found him. To put it vaguely.
It happened so long ago.
She was straying in search of wild flowers. Yellow only.
With no eyes but for these she stumbled on him lying there. He lay face downward and arms
outspread. He wore a greatcoat in
spite of the time of yearÉ
May she have seen him somewhere before? Somewhere on his feet before?
- One Evening -
AS
THE STORY WAS TOLD, BECKETT SHORT No.9
John Calder Publishers,
London, 1999, pp.24-25