Company

by Samuel Beckett

«Una voz llega a alguien en la oscuridad.» Este alguien yace boca arriba en la oscuridad, escuchando la voz que se dirige a él, a veces débilmente desde lejos, otras un murmullo al oído, la voz es «compañía»: la mente nunca cesa de hablar, recordar, sugerir, preguntar o simplemente, repetir alguna frase lúdica como una aguja atascada en el surco de un disco... Compañía es el texto mas importante y más extenso —pese a su brevedad— que Beckett escribió en sus últimos años. Como escribió Aldo «La especial densidad que lo caracteriza procede de su naturaleza paradigmática, puesto que en el reencontramos temas y tonos propios de obras anteriores. Su estructura, formada por varios segmentos de variable longitud y separados por una pausa, permite calculadas traslaciones de la anécdota parabiográfica a la reflexión, del tono lírico al argumentativo, del estilema que nos recuerda los primeros pasajes narrativos beckettianos al que recuerda los últimos.»

Compañía es un paso adelante en la exploración de lo finalmente inexplorable, en la odisea del autor descendiendo a los abismos de la imaginación creadora. Aunque, como siempre, Beckett ilumina sus propias tinieblas con austera hilaridad.

«Una nueva novela de Beckett es una obra de arte para saborear. Es un deleite para paladear. Es suntuoso. Es estimulante. Es intensamente sensual... un inigualable maestro del idioma inglés, el más refinado artista verbal del siglo veinte» (Peter Tinniswood The Times )

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literature, Classics, Irish Literature, Plays, Ireland

89 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you're elderly it PAYS to be positive.

And the longer my hope and faith endures, the more I eschew negativity...

But not the unnamed narrator of Beckett's claustrophobic - though doubtless true-to-many oldtimers - yarn.

There's an Old Man. He lives alone. Like others, he has a crowd of silent witnesses. Don't we all these days.

So he can't sit still.

He's spooked., perhaps. Not frantic though, like he's lost it.

Some old folks can't abide the internet, and are set adrift in their thoughts. Their thoughts become circular, and alienating. Maybe it’s their Alexa?

We have a few elderly friends like that - we can see that without a busy inner or outer life, the mind fires, sputters and stalls.

So they try to keep busy and diverted.

With no company, though, their strength peters out.

We know a childless pair of one-time lovers who are running on empty. They're running out of ideas, hope and positivity.

And we know another such elderly friend whose children avoid her.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

These friends keep their faces in a jar by the door, for their lives, like Beckett's narrator, have become faceless and nameless - though in fact they are sucked into another irresistible vortex - meaningless media entertainment.

Why not find Meaning, friends?

Meaning is something we feel in our hearts, or not at all.

Don't get caught in their - and Company's - vortex.

For Beckett intended Company to be one sad old man's look at his own endangered humanity (the last positive thing to go) -

But, curiously (and presciently?) Beckett died before the Internet.

The web, that final monkey wrench in the busy machinery of a senior's daily life...

It is lyrical, and rather hopeful in a vague sense, for his narrator escapes routinely into his innocent memories.

It was written in the eighties, the years of Reagan and Thatcher, so go figure! Wow, is it seniors now.

But I leave with one piece of Beckett's thought, for you and my old friends as well:

Keep your mind and heart active in your youth - I'm serious about this - for old age is the final major critical "use it or lose it" time!

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trump Reviews The Classics

Guys, I love this Sam Beckett. What a great man, what a great American. And hair to die. Hair for days. It’s a gorgeous head of American hair.

I appreciate every one of this book’s 63 pages. Sure, each is more obfuscatingly averbose (I wrote that) than the last, but I like a challenge. The font size and page-cut are also as generous as the tax incentives of incorporating under my new bill, so that’s huge too. Huge! Literally and the opposite of literally. Believe me.

Let’s build a wall to keep people like Beckett and all Americans safe from foreign hordes. I love corn dogs!

[Aslı Can]

Beckett'le aramızda şöyle bir şey var; o konuşuyor, konuşurken söylediklerinden hiçbir şey anlamıyorum gibi geliyor, sonra bir anda konuşması bittiğinde ne dediğini anlamasam da ne demek istediğini çok iyi anladığımı hissediyorum. Bazen tek bir cümlesi bile yetiyor sezdirmeye.

[blckshrt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond depressing
Beyond good

It is a dark, pessimistic, poetic, somewhat autobiographical prose.
It begins (and as can be expected from Beckett, also ends) with a man on his back in the dark. Listening to a voice that tells him about the present, past and future.

The person on his back in the dark first isn't sure about the voice: is it his, a second person to him or a second person to a third? He struggles with this voice and the things that are said -"Confusion too is company," he says, "up to a point". At times he seemed plagued/tormented and seems to want the voice to stop, but at the same time it seems he also needs this voice -"And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company".

The voice tells vivid stories of the past (in second person) -these seem Beckett's memories- of events that were meaningful or had big impact on the listener in his childhood and early adulthood. Memories of birth, walking with his mother, jumping from a tree, walking with his father, killing a hedgehog he had tried to help, and waiting for a girl in a summer house. (At least I think these are his memories because Beckett was also born on Easter, has said to remember his birth, often walked with his father and his mother is mentioned to be neurotic, abusive, and cruel).

As this narrative proceeds, it becomes more and more apparent that the voice has been invented by the listener -man on his back in the dark- for company:
"The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark."
Everything has been inside his head. This raises the following issues: the need to imagine, the truth in memories, memories versus the inability to reconnect to the past (because the listener doesn't know if these recollections are his), the need for company.

The book can leave you wondering if all connections in life are not (somewhat) imagined connections in need for company. The need for memories and dwell on them for the same reasons. To pretend you are not alone.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Texto abstracto, áspero y difícil que explora los mecanismos de la creación en una especie de work in progress hipnótico y absorbente. La mezcla de retazos autobiográficos con experimentos formales supone un reto lector complejo pero siempre abierto a la interpretación activa, entre el existencialismo y el absurdo.

[aybikimben · Rating 4 out of 5]

yapayalnız bir kitap,,, okur ve nesneler dışında kimsesi yok

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a seamless, austere beauty to the sentences in Samuel Beckett’s Company. They have been cast, recast, distilled, refined, polished. They are frictionless, irreducible. As I read, I could picture Beckett in a Spartan room bent over a typewriter, weighing the cadence of each syllable he types. I picture it as lonely, nearly obsessive work, and this image of the writer typing each word only enhances the novel’s strange and forlorn beauty.

It isn’t often that considering the act of its writing enriches a text at the moment it is being read, but it does so in this case. This isn’t the inwardly folding metafiction I am used to reading. When Beckett encourages us to consider the voice speaking the words, and not just the words themselves, the effect seems to be a kind of expansion and not collapse. Each time a voice is revealed, a new layer is added to the text. “Use of the second person marks the voice,” he writes. “That of the third cankerous other.”

In physics, when an electron moves from one energy level to another, it is never between the two levels. An atom’s electrons move in spheres within spheres, layers within layers, and sometimes they make an instantaneous quantum leap from one layer to the next, but without ever crossing the space between. Company is full of such leaps from one level to the next. The novel gives us concrete stories and images—memories (reliable or not) of the “you” lying in darkness. We are given fragments of narratives—rescued hedgehogs, sexual fumblings, plunges from high dives into cold seawater—but for every mundane image of a human relationship, there is a quantum leap of sorts. This work is made of spheres within spheres and layers within layers.

Like the author hunched over his typewriter, we are invited to picture the story’s “you,” in the stultifying silence of his own room, bent over his watch.

"Numb with the woes of your kind your raise none the less your head from off your hands and open your eyes…. Your eyes light on the watch lying beneath it. But instead of reading the hour of night they follow round and round the second hand now followed and now preceeded by its shadow. Hours later it seems to you it follows. At 60 seconds and 30 seconds shadow hidden by hand. From 60 to 30 shadow precedes hand at a distance increasing from zero at 60 to maximum at 15 and thence decreasing to new zero at 30."

The painstaking description of the second hand moving (of time passing, of life slipping by) goes on for two pages, and it depicts a depth of solitude and purposelessness that is soul crushing. “The shadow emerges from under hand at any point whatever of its circuit to follow or precede it for the space of 30 seconds. Then disappears infinitely briefly before emerging again to precede or follow it for the space of 30 seconds again. This would seem to be one constant.” The “you” has happened upon an element of design in the world, but it is insular, pointless—the kind of discovery one might make waiting alone for long hours in a featureless room, without a book to pass the time.

And then the quantum leap occurs. “But unable to continue you bow your head to where it was and with closed eyes return to the woes of your kind. Dawn finds you still in this position. The low sun shines on you through the eastern window and flings all along the floor your shadow and that of the lamp left lit above you.” The sweep of the second hand around the watch’s dial is like the movement of the sun across the sky. The fruitless minutes become days. The second hand’s inconsequential shadow becomes the equally accidental shadow of the “you,” creeping across the floor.

But that, of course, is not where Beckett stops. There are other layers. “Till feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. For readier reference. Himself some other character. W.” We are invited here to make a further leap to consider the author in his own room as he sits at his typewriter casting a backward shadow. “Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment.”

And the leaping to higher realms continues until it can continue no more: “Devised deviser devising it all for company. In the same figment dark as his figments.” If there were a singular, eternal God, would this universe not be his own dark and empty room? Might he not have been driven by his solitude to create all that exists as company?

Is to exist anything other than to find oneself somewhere among these layer in layers, these dark rooms sealed within dark rooms, isolated and hopelessly bereft, wanting nothing more than company?

And what other ending could there be but Beckett’s final soul-crushing epiphany?

“Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And now better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were…. Alone.”

[Romina · Rating 4 out of 5]

''Company'' almost finds a way to discuss the undiscussable...

[Makis Dionis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Επινοητής του εαυτού σου για να έχεις συντροφιά. Ας το αφήσουμε έτσι

[v (e-vey)* 🍓 · Rating 5 out of 5]

bir deli kuyuya tas atmis kirk akilli cikaramamis ya hani, deli beckett kirk akilli da ben ve benliklerim

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of the last three short novels that Beckett produced in the 1980's, Company is both a seamless continuation of the author's so frequently used scenario of uprooted, near personality-less, semi-human, and often physically disintegrating figures wandering through bleak landscapes that populate the Irish author's fiction from Watt through How it Is and, at the same time, an interesting and quite beautiful new distillation of the themes of subsistence, wandering (aimless desire for one knows not what perhaps), human interaction (or the lack thereof), and the imagination's role in composing the very scenario the text is presenting.

Here the ostensible reason for imagining, for bringing the characters to life within the landscape, replete this time with childhood memories (written with a realism and simple honesty seen in no other Beckett text!), is to create a false sense (judging from the text's last word) of company. Does the author, or at least the narrators of Beckett's stories and novels, speak to create some small sense of companionship by verbally/textually creating themselves and similarly desolate figures, to reach out and co-involve an imagined reader, simply to feel less alone because the production of written words becomes a kind of solace in talking to oneself? This, I think, is the proposition that sets Company in motion.

It's an irresistible comparison so I'll have to note how much more distilled and poetic Company and its two companion novels (Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstword Ho!) are to the three earlier novels often referred to as the Unnamable trilogy. While those earlier novels are genius in their power and originality, Company and co. (ha! Couldn't resist) are more precise and poetic, distilled and luscious in their use of a poetic language simultaneously beautiful but without the ornamentation of style that Beckett abhorred--judging from his comment that he switched from writing in English to French as it was easier in his adopted language to write "without style." These three final novels are my favorite Beckettian works, the best of one of the beast writers I know. I just revel in their poetry and their weird truth.

PS And, yes, this Dantist did notice the two allusions to the musician Belaqua (found in the second section of the Tuscan poet's Commedia), who provided the name for Beckett's first fictional self back in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks. He's the composer/singer who set Dante's lyric verses to music and whom the pilgrim finds newly arrived in purgatory--another form of company, collaboration perhaps?

[lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

La mente como única "compañía", narrada desde una perspectiva original y única. Siendo Beckett, un poco locura.

[Mandel]

(Part of my current project of reading everything Beckett published in precise chronological order.)

I'm sure that many will read Beckett's late masterpiece as yet another grim work devoted to the exploration of loneliness, despair, and helplessness. But I read Company in a different way entirely. There's a solitude that isn't loneliness, an abandonment of hope that isn't despair, and a quietude that isn't helplessness. And, it seems to me, Company is a vivid and beautiful exploration of these facts.

A lone figure lies prone in the dark, hearing (or perhaps inventing) a voice speaking to him of his condition, and recounting memories - perhaps fictional ones - from his past. At the beginning of the narrative, these memories are quite concrete: memories of climbing trees, of walking from the store holding his mother's hand, of imitating his father's laughter. As the text progresses, however, these memories are increasingly stripped of context and interpretation: memories of walking a path, of seeing a woman's face in the dark, of watching the shadows cast by the hands of a clock - fleeting moments that have a startling and haunting immediacy. The final memory is of him withdrawing to some dark, quiet place to occupy the position he is in right now - lying in the dark, on the verge of freeing himself from the need to entertain visions of elsewhere and other times, and becoming fully present, becalmed.

The final word of the novella is "Alone" - centered there on the page all by itself. But this climactic solitude strikes me as the solitude of acceptance, of a hard-won peace. As Pascal famously said: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I think Beckett knew that, though it took much of his life to really realize it, and through the journey of Company's unnamed subject, he conveys that insight with startling depth.

[Irmak · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 farklı hikaye anlatılıyor. Beckett'in seneler önce bir kitabını okumaya çalışmıştım aynı anda bir sürü farklı an ve kişi anlatılıyordu ama gerçekten aynı anda. Çünkü cümleler arasında nokta yoktu. Hangisinin anı hangi fiille bilen filan hiçbir şekilde çözemiyordun. O nedenle kitabı anca 30. sayfaya kadar filan okuyabilmiştim.
Seneler sonra kendisine -belki de bana- bir şans daha verdim. 110 sayfalık kitabı okumam herhalde 8 saatimi almış olabilir ki kitabın tümünün herhalde yarısını anlayabilmişimdir. Üç hikayeden ilki sırtüstü yatan bir adamın yattığı o anla ilgili. İkincisi çok yaşlı bir kadının ölümü beklemesi ancak aslında öyle bir beklentinin de olmaması gibi. Yani kadının durumu ölümü bekliyor ancak kadın yaşamaya çalışıyor. Üçüncü bölüm de belki çekilebilirse güzel bir kısa film olur ancak üç beş kişinin aynı anda tartışarak okuması lazım. Beckettin silindirin içinde oluşturduğu konsepti anlamak çok da kolay değil. Merdivenlerin basamakları var bazıları kopuk ancak aradaki boşlukları bir şekilde doldurup gittikçe yükseğe çıkmaya çalışıyorlar ancak pek de bir bok anlamamış olabilirim. Biraz hiyerarşi ile ilgili ve aynı zamanda kuralların kendi kendisini koymasıyla ilgili olduğunu tahmin edebilirim. Belki. Ancak ilk iki ölü durumuna göre bu baya bir devinimli ancak fikir olarak bu da ölü.
Yani diyeceğim şu ki bu adamın kurduğu cümlelerdeki mekaniklik inanılmaz. Gerçek hayatta tam bir poker face miydi gerçekten merak ediyorum. Artı bu adamın eserlerinin neden bu kadar değerli olduğunu da anlamıyorum. Evet ton alarak skalanın farklı bir yerinde yer alıyor ancak ne kadar iyi? Tam sanat sanat için ama hiç mi insan için değil? Azıcık bile mi??
Bu arada sanırım okumaya çalıştığım kitap Beckettin üçlemesinin ilki imiş. Murphy diye bir kitabı ilgimi çekti onu da denemeyi düşünüyorum.(bunları ilk sayfadaki biyografiden öğrendim) Maurice Blanchot'un bir değişiğiydi. Bu tipleri toplayıp şarabı basıp konuşun ulan demek istiyorum aslında demek istediğiniz nedir yani?

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

’Met elk hol woord iets dichter bij het laatste.’

[Javier Gil Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hipnótica, obsesiva, paradigmática y profundamente beckettiana.

[Gerardo Daniel Jiménez · Rating 3 out of 5]

A través de distintos fragmentos se narra una escena en la que una voz se dice a sí misma que está acostada en la oscuridad. Como suele ser el caso con Beckett, la obra busca abismarse en la inmovilidad y anularse a sí misma. Me pareció su versión del famoso pasaje inicial de «En busca del tiempo perdido», porque aquí también nos encontramos con un personaje que yace insomne en la oscuridad recordando momentos de su infancia. Sin embargo, si en Proust nos encontramos con una sensibilidad desmesurada y nítida, en Beckett nos encontramos una experiencia vaga y mínima de cosas que, además, no son necesariamente recuerdos, si no que bien podrían ser también sueños, relatos, conjeturas: a la voz no le importa diferenciar. Creo que en general el libro es una buena aportación a la compañía.

[Adolfo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corto e intenso relato consigo mismo.

[Gökhan Gök · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karanlıkta bir ses gelir birine. İmgele.

[Cobi · Rating 4 out of 5]

had to go back to the old me

[Rhys · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beckett has a style of writing that has long fascinated me. I regard Waiting for Godot as one of the best plays ever written and Watt as one of the best novels. I will always be tempted to read any book of his that comes my way. And so it was with Company, a novella or novelette that I didn't fully understand but which I found deeply affecting anyway. I first heard of it many years ago when I learned that Philip Glass had composed a piece inspired by it, and now over the Christmas period I was cat-sitting for a friend and a copy was on the bookshelves. It doesn't take long to read, but I'm sure it will linger in my imagination for a lifetime.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly, nothing at all like the Sondheim musical. There are a few great numbers, like "Crawling on the Floor" and the dance hit "Blck Basalt (Temptation Remix), but nothing as finger-popping as his old "The Show Can't Go On, The Show Must Go On."

[S.]

"A dead rat. What an addition to company that would be! A rat long dead."

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read it twice and have come to the same conclusion each time: THIS BOOK IS COMPLETE GIBBERISH.

[Myhte]

To darkness visible to close the eyes and hear if only that. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more.

[cler · Rating 1 out of 5]

no lo pillo, lo siento

[Oscar Sson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Por suerte es corto. No le encuentro ningún sentido

[Lark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look some of you are getting way too heady about this
We are looking at a man born onto the autism spectrum and then shaped by trauma both complex and singularly impactful. Evidence points to a lot of the “negative symptoms” of schizophrenia too. (See hypersymbolic thought)
I dunno - that’s the one thing about this work that is stuck in my craw, and it’s not his fault. I don’t think we are looking at meticulously crafted and deliberate thing. The review in the back praises his “economy of language, his remorseless stripping away of superfluities”
Did we read the same book? So much of this IS superfluous because we are looking at someone who is throwing all of his feelings, or rather his CEASELESS intellectualization of his feelings, onto paper.
This feels desperate and frantic to me. We are seeing him search to find an image to make sense of himself, and HUGE UPS to any author that strikes something familiar to the reader, but I don’t think we are looking at an existential ~take on things~ like some reviews suggest
Maybe I am undereducated, but there is no convention of literature he allows here to restrict himself or seemingly abide by (writing a play, for instance requires certain conventions, and this was a struggle for him too - Godot was so widely hated until people understood his work for being a work of STRONG FEELING and then they appreciated the craft of it)

I love this man because I see so much of myself in him and wish he had gotten to enjoy MORE the silliness of post-post-modern thought and nihilism that he himself helped shape.
I wish more folks would accept this about him and works like this. He was a sad sack who constantly embarrassed himself in front of his friends and so much of his work was a desperate attempt to match the level and pace of his idols
(See the story of his bad Mussolini impression - it’s sad but it’s SO funny if you can distance yourself)
You can analyze the prose all you want, and maybe you’d find something he intended, but when we paint him as a removed thinker we glide over the fact that people who write like this need help and support, deserve happiness and love.

[javier fernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

En una de tantas tareas universitarias que no revisa el profesor sino la ayudante teníamos que escribir una especie de bitácora, tipo diario de vida. En la retroalimentación de mi entrega , la ayudante escribió que mi texto le recordaba a este libro, y que lo leyera si no lo había hecho aún.

No sé cuánto me demoré en bajar un PDF del libro, pero alguna vez lo hice, y revisé sus primeras páginas. Me pareció muy interesante y me prometí leerlo alguna vez.

Hoy llegó ese momento y estoy sorprendido de que esa ayudante (ni siquiera la recuerdo a ella en particular, en pandemia las personas eran menos reales) haya sabido reconocer en un mal texto como lo era mi bitácora un interés escritural genuino oculto bajo capas de ineptitud, poca práctica, imágenes prosaicas. Mi texto no se parecía, no sé dónde le dejé pistas de que alguna vez me iba a querer ir por este lado. Pero sí, me gustaría matarme escribiendo para conseguir algo así alguna vez. Es exactamente el tipo de escritura que me interesa un poco más que la otra.

Quizás debiera aclarar para mi yo mismo del futuro que no alcancé a captar del todo lo que el texto desarrolla. Al no ser del todo bilingüe me fascinó pero también me costó su inglés tan libre, que prioriza la expresividad poética por sobre el decir comprensible. Se podría decir que más que entender lo que pasó fue que vi la visión. Juro que la vi. Y quiero leerlo de nuevo en español para tener una segunda pasada con la visión en mente.

[Searchingthemeaningoflife Greece · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Για να είναι συντροφιά πρέπει να έχει μία κάποια διανοητική δραστηριότητα. Δεν είναι ανάγκη όμως να είναι υψηλής στάθμης.  Θα μπορούσε μάλιστα να υποστηριχθεί ότι όσο χαμηλότερης είναι τόσο καλύτερα είναι. Ως ένα ορισμένο σημείου. Όσο χαμηλότερης στάθμης είναι η διανοητική του δραστηριότητα, τόσο καλύτερη συντροφιά είναι. Ως ένα ορισμένο σημείο.

•  ...λίγο-λίγο η σιωπή έπεσε και πλάκωσε το σκοτάδι. Αυτό θα ήταν ίσως πιο καλό για συντροφιά. Γιατί από τι οι αραιοί θόρυβοι; Από πού το μισόφωτο;

•  Σύννεφα λέει θα είδες. Κι έτσι, από τότες, τα θησαυρίζεις στην καρδιά σου μαζί με όλα τα' άλλα. Γυρίζεις σπίτι καθώς πέφτει η νύχτα και πλαγιάζεις αδείπνητος. Κοίτεσαι στο μαύρο σκοτάδι και βρίσκεσαι πίσω σε εκείνο το φως.

•  Μα με το πρόσωπο ανάστροφο μία και καλή, θα παιδεύεσαι άδικα με το μύθο σου. Ως που επιτέλους ν' ακούσεις ότι, όπως βγαίνει, οι λέξεις όπου να ναι τελειώνουν με την κάθε κούφια λέξη όλο και λιγάκι πιο κοντά στην τελευταία. Και μαζί τους και ο μύθος. Ο μύθος κάποιου άλλου μαζί σου στο μαύρο σκοτάδι. Ο μύθος του εαυτού σου μυθευόμενου κάποιον μαζί σου στο μαύρο σκοτάδι. Και ότι όπως βγαίνει πιο καλά εν τέλει χαμένος κόπος και σιωπή. Κι εσύ όπως ήσουν ανέκαθεν.

Μόνος.