Beckett's 106th

Samuel Beckett, born on this day, in 1906.

At the age of 26 he read Moby-Dick, and wrote to his close friend Tom MacGreevy, "That's more like the real stuff. White whales and natural piety." (Damned to Fame, James Knowlson, 1996.)

And a slightly-relevant quote from Molloy:

There are people the sea doesn't suit, who prefer the mountains or the plain. Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else. ... And I too once went forth on it, in a sort of oarless skiff, but I paddled with an old bit of drifwood. And I sometimes wonder if I ever came back, from that voyage. For if I see myself putting to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the breakers, and I do not hear the frail keel grating on the shore.

On Beckett's birthday

Samuel Beckett born April 13, 1906.

Was there one among them to put himself in my place, to feel how removed I was then from him I seemed to be, and in that remove what strain, as of hawsers about to snap? It's possible. Yes, I was straining towards those spurious deeps, their lying promise of gravity and peace, from all my old poisons I struggled towards them, safely bound.
- Molloy

I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet.
- Chapter CXXXIV