The first time I ever heard of the play Waiting for Godot, I was near thirty. I was frustrated by a situation at work and complaining about the attitudes of some of my coworkers to my boss. “It’s like they see a wall, they talk about how there is a wall, but rather than check if they can go through the wall, around the wall, or climb over it, they just stand there, bitterly complaining about the wall. It’s just a 10 foot wide wall, I don’t get why they just won’t do something.” My boss just smiled, “I know what you mean, it’s like Waiting for Godot.”

I considered myself something of a culture snob and my then-boss was a suburban dad, so missing that reference rankled. He took great pleasure in rubbing it in. “Really?! I can’t believe you don’t know that play! It’s quite famous you know. Could it be you studied it in high school and then forgot? You aren’t as young as you used to be… No? Oh well, go read it, it should be part of your general education. You’re missing out, quite unlike you.” After he had stopped giggling to himself, my boss explained to me that Waiting for Godot is a play about two guys Vladimir and Estragon (a perennial herb?) who meet up every day around sunset, unable to go anywhere or do anything, because they are waiting on Mr. Godot who said he might come find them, but never today, always tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon wonder if their life would be better if they took action by walking away from their current circumstances. An accurate description of what goes on in any workplace at times if there ever was one!

As luck would have it, the following weekend I began sorting through my mother’s books. A few hours in, I found a 1954 edition of the play on my mother’s bookshelves. As my mother used to buy all her books second hand when she was young, I’m assuming the initial cost of the book was $0.85 in 1954, and had risen to $1.50 in the 1970s when my mother was building out the early phases of her library. The cost of inflation is real!

It’s a fantastic play, quick to read and easy to imagine. Written in 1952 by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman living in France throughout WWII, the depiction of the pointlessness of life and the limiting powers of learned helplessness must have struck a chord. The humor (see below for the excerpt on ejaculations!) is what stops this play from being yet another bleak view on mankind. I felt as though I was reading a commentary on current day life, not something that was written 70 years ago!

Here are a few of my favorite quotes.

On human nature:

Vladimir: There’s man all over you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

On men and their “second brain”:

Vladimir: What do we do now?

Estragon: Wait.

Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?

Vladimir: Hmmm. It’d give us an erection.

Estragon: (highly excited) An erection!

Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately.

I appreciate Estragon’s transparency; it accurately sums up more than one dude I’ve had the dubious pleasure to date. What I particularly appreciated in this passage however is the reference to mandrakes. I had only known of mandrakes as they are described in Harry Potter, as plants that scream when uprooted and whose cries are fatal to any who hear them. I’d chalked that up to J.K. Rowling’s endless creativity, but it turns out that myth has been around since the 10th century, and the one about mandrakes and fertility dates back to the Bible!

On the lost art of good conversation:

Estragon: In the mean time let us try and converse calmly since we are incapable of keeping silent.

Vladimir: You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.

Estragon: It’s so we won’t think.

Vladimir: We have that excuse.

Estragon: It’s so we won’t hear.

Vladimir: We have our reasons.

We’ve all been the person who talks to run away from themselves – I certainly have! My high school English teacher told my mother I suffered from extreme “verbal diarrhea”: all fluff, no substance. She was right. I still do! Why use one word when the use of many will dazzle and distract?

On thinking:

Vladimir: Oh, it’s not the worst, I know.

Estragon: What?

Vladimir: To have thought.

Estragon: Obviously.

Vladimir: But we could have done without it.

As someone who is guilty of doom-scrolling to numb anxiety, I have known many a day where I wished it was possible to avoid thinking.

On why it took me so long to relaunch blogging:

Vladimir: We could start all over perhaps.

Estragon: That should be easy.

Vladimir: It’s the start that’s difficult.

Estragon: You can start from anything.

Vladimir: Yes but you have to decide.

Estragon: True

So here I am – decided! I could have done an origin story type post of how I came to be with all these books, but I was suffering from massive writer’s block. So instead, we are diving in straight into the reviews, and the origin story will be told when the moment is right.

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A few words I discovered while reading this book:

• Aphoristic: (adj.) full of aphorisms (statements like “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”).
• Bawd: (n.) a woman in charge of a house of prostitution.
• Caryatid: (n.) a draped female figure used instead of column as a support in classical architecture; the male equivalent is an atlas or a telamon.
• Charnel-house: (n.) a building or house in which corpses or bones are piled; a place associated with violent death.
• Dudeen: (n.) a short tobacco pipe made of clay.
• Effulgence: (n.) the quality of shining brightly.
• Farandole: (n.) a lively dance popular in Provence, France, in which men and women hold hands, form a chain, and follow the leader through a serpentine course.
• Morpion: (French, n.) pubic lice or young boy (French is a very weird language sometimes).
• Threnody: (n.) a song of lamentation.

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