Cold World Excerpt: Endnote
Yet another daily excerpt from Cold World…
In Endgame…the world is not losing its mind but its contents: ordinary language survives the extinction of its referents, and in doing so ceases to be ordinary. The “coldness” of Beckett’s world is not the coldness of dead matter, of a world that persists in spite of the loss of linguistic meaning, but the chill of the void around language, which achieves a stark lucidity once there is nothing or next to nothing left for it to be about. There is no question of a revival or resurgence in Endgame: what’s gone is gone, but what is most terrible is that that which endures, endures. As Stephen Immerwahr sings, in Codeine’s “Old Things”: “Things don’t last too long, / but when they do, / they last too long”.