Beckett’s own embrace of such an attitude can be seen in a beautiful letter he wrote in 1968 to Barbara Bray, a BBC producer he met while working on his radio plays who became a close confidante and companion. Bray’s husband had died in an accident and she had written to Beckett to share the news. He replied:
Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest.
Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing.
After some careful disclaimers about his lack of useful wisdom, Beckett makes the astonishing suggestion that Bray should move towards ‘the heart of the gales of grief’, since it is there that these gales have ‘already … blown themselves out’. His description suggests a place of stillness and peace in the midst of suffering, perhaps like the eye of a hurricane. Beckett’s solution is paradoxically both an escape – as suggested by the word ‘fly’ – and also a courageous refusal to turn away from pain. He suggests that the movement out of pain is one that flies right into it, that embraces it whole-heartedly, that resigns itself and surrenders to it. Salvation is found, oddly enough, in a place of weakness, humility and lowliness, right in the midst of suffering. This is Beckett’s mystic paradox.
How Samuel Beckett Sought Salvation in the Midst of Suffering, by Andy Wimbush, pub. Aeon [ID’d]
Where each of us may find the sources of consolation when thus afflicted by a loss is a question of personal experience and fate. I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. For it is unthinkable that this ever possible, providential pain, which is so often aimed at and inflicted upon human beings, is inconsolable. This pain in particular allows the most personal and sweetest consolation to come to ripen for us: The great-est, nearest, and most pressing human loss in particular shelters the fruit of consolation most reliably. Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off—it reveals itself for those who can trust it, in spite of its overwhelming and dire ap-pearance, as a kind of initiation. By way of loss, by way of such vast and immeasurable experiences of loss, we are quite powerfully introduced to the whole.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Dark Interval
hexafu 