Resolutions: Zero. Hopes: Zero.

Well, I hope I don't come off as a fatalist sharing this, but I thought there are worse ways to end a year and start a new one than share something from Samuel Beckett. At least, he was realistic as well as funny. And I must say, if you keep this somewhat glum state of mind, you should not get disappointed for 2022.

Godot Logistics

I never played Samuel Beckett, but I did study him a bit at uni. He is one of those writersI wished I had studied more. Read this post from 2010 and that one from 2013 to know a little more about Beckett and me. But anyway, I saw this meme online recently and it really made me laugh. Of the works of Beckett, his most famous might be Waiting for Godot, which of course I studied, so yeah, I thought it was hilarious. I guess I'm easily pleased.

Trivia about Samuel Beckett and Patrick Magee

I once mentioned here that I wrote an essay when I was an undergraduate about Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. I still think to this day that it was my best undergraduate paper. For the same course, on XXth century theater, I had made a brilliant oral presentation about the same play... Now where am I going with this? I will not praise myself overtly: I mentioned these pieces of work because a lot of what I did at that time was pretty rubbish. But also because, reading about the play, I (re)discovered that it was first performed by Patrick Magee in the role. The title role and the only role of the play. in fact, Beckett wrote the part especially for him. Patrick Magee also played in Barry Lydon and of course in A Clockwork Orange. I wonder if my sensibilities played some role into choosing to study this play in particular, since Magee played in one of my favorite movies, based on one of my favorite novels at the time. The teacher had said it was a difficult choice, I had read little Beckett before, yet I felt like a fish in the water reading it. I often regret not doing further studies on Beckett, or performing in one of his plays. I read Krapp's Last Tape eagerly, but never saw it on stage, although I did caught the second half of an adaptation on the BBC once. I know I can find the original performance on YouTube. Goodie.

Those tortuous paths

So I will start my new job on the 21 after all. I don't know yet how it is going to turn out, suffice to say that it is far from the teaching world I have been used for the last year or so. It made me think of all the jobs I had, all the things I studied, the choices I made, the ones I refused to make and the paths I did not take.

There is a popular saying, taken from the Bible, that says that a man has to walk a "straight and narrow path" (the correct quote here). It makes for great songs, but it is inaccurate and naïve, at best. Paths in life are often narrow, but they are rarely straight. They are tortuous and filled with uncertainty. I could have been a lot of things at some point, yet I took educational and career paths that led me somewhere else and I was never sure of the arrival or the journey. I studied acting and opera, at some point I seriously considered becoming either an actor or an opera singer, but those careers are more uncertain than the life of an academic.

Even studying literature, a number of possibilities came to me. I decided to do medieval literature partially because it was one of the first period of literature I discovered I was naturally good at. But I found out later on that I could easily make intelligent and compelling analysis of contemporary plays (like say this one), Contemporary plays were never particularly attractive to me, but I had an almost unwilling fascination for them, enough to be good at "getting" them. I am still very proud of a paper I wrote on Krapp's Past Tape of Beckett, maybe my best essay as an undergrad. I could have become one of those many XXth century specialists, with a vast amount of plays to work on, including the ones of the all new XXIth century. I didn't follow that path, maybe because I was so unfamiliar with the field of studies that I thought I might not be original enough to sustain years of research in this field.

And there are of course other paths I might take, or not, and if I do I have no idea where they will lead. The teaching world has generally been good to me, except in recent years, where I had mixed results. It will be good to be away from it for a little while. But where will I be in a few months, I have no idea.