At the Loeb Waiting For Godot

WAITING FOR GODOT is about immobility. Vladimir and Estragon sit in a place which is essentally nowhere; they entertain or bore one another; they sit. Like the street people who haunt the Square because there's no place for them to go, Vladimir and Estragon have internalized inevitability of inactivity. "Nothing to be done," when incanted as often as a mantra, can be cerily comforting. The dilemma of two tramps, waiting for a man who will not come, is our dilemma, too. And we remain waiting because the possibility of meaning, or of reason, or of order, is so seductive. If there were a Godot he would be here with us and we would be happy, infinitely happy, with full faith in the ultimate triumph of mind. Because Godot does not come, we wait; we are all street freaks, passing the time with the games Western civilization has been kind enough to bequeath us.

Or we can kill ourselves. But there is always suicide, and the possibility is as attractive for tomorrow as for yesterday.

Estragon: Why don't we hang ourselves?

Vladimir: What what? [They discover they have no adequate rope.]

Estragon: You say we have to come back tomorrow?

Vladimir: Yes.

Etsragon: Then we can bring a good bit of rope.

Vladimir: Yes.

SILENCE.

Estragon: I can't go on like this.

Vladimir: That's what you think.

The apocalypse is personally, viciously immanent as long as Godot-Godhead, revelation, a truth-declines to appear. But, cruelly, living death is more than personal. At almost every event in our hysterical universe, the End rears its cross-eyed, leering face. Sometimes it looks like a bloodthirsty section man, sometimes like an Erich Segal, sometimes like a Richard Nixon. Or, more frightening, the End is in the eyes of a street kid asking for change, in the shaking hands of your friend crashing on exam-period speed, in the magazine covers that report the battle of the hemline with the fervor of Edwin R. Murrow covering the blitz.

Waiting for Godot, with exquisite precision, records the pain of existence. "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops." So says Pozzo, the slavedriver, the pig, the spokesman for a decaying, overburdened, but strangely charming establishment. "There is no lack of void," says Estragon, cap-turing in his words the twentiethcentury's ironic understanding of time and space. And the agony, the anomic, the anxiety, the sheer numbing ignorance of existence is what impassions Vladimir's shriek to an unhearing universe:

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?... At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

If that revelation can be called meaning, then its price is unhappiness, and its power can shape a generation.