By Norman Lock
“But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”
—Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett
Even now, forty years after my eyes first fell upon some words of Samuel Beckett’s put into the mouth of Krapp, in the play by that name, even now that memory’s sponge is starting to ossify, I cannot forget this passage, the loveliest of all those I remember having read—lovelier even than T. S. Eliot’s “And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow” from the “Journey of the Magi”—Beckett’s sentence, by its measure, movement, repetition, and cunning placement of commas, reproducing the sensation described by Krapp within the somatic cavity where the soul (to speak in the old style) is pitched to pleasure’s sweetest frequency.
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