"A unique moral figure," I wrote of [Beckett] five years ago, "not a dreamer of rose gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the wasteland, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere." It's 30 years—is that conceivable?—since he wrote "Godot," a play still perfectly vital, its eloquence spare then, still spare now, het positively garrulous by the standards he sets himself today. In the late months of his 72d year, he bends more and more effort on fewer and fewer words, still pursuing his impossible ambition of making silence sing. The most frequent stage direction in "Godot" was "Pause." Last year in "Footfalls," a play like a late Beethoven quartet, the most eloquent voice was that of a girl not speaking, simply pacing, pacing, very possibly a girl not there, since the last spills of light did not show her at all. Beckett's words, some for her, some to her, some about her, were uttered by a mouth we could not see, and were never more beautiful.

This gentle, generous, punctilious man appears on no talk shows, offers no opinions, grants no interviews, and writes sentences. I could show you a Beckett sentence as elegant in its implications as the binomial theorem, and another as economically sphynx-like as the square root of minus one, and another, on trees in the night, for which half of Wordsworth would seem a fair exchange. The declarative sentence, he makes you suppose, is perhaps man's highest achievement, as absolute as the egg was for Brancusi. That hens lay eggs round the clock the way grocers utter sentences renders neither Brancusi's nor Beckett's preoccupation trivial. We have an obligation to speak with the tongues of angels, as if we could, and a man who won't tire of confronting this obligation can remind us all of our calling. (p. 58)