One Book And One Week : كتاب واحد وأسب

All we may regret is the town’s being so disposed that it turns its back on the bay, with the result that it’s impossible to see the sea, you always have to go look for it.

Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn til night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafes, and in small-talk what time is left for living.

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.

We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly toward eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.

‘There may be something in the letter to keep us going a bit.’ (Guildenstern)
‘And if not?’ (Rosencrantz)
‘Then that’s it – we’re finished.’ (Guildenstern)
‘At a loose end?’ (Rosencrantz)
‘Yes.’ (Guildenstern)

‘We’re not finished, then?’ (Rosencrantz)
‘Well, we’re here, aren’t we?’ (Guildenstern)
‘Are we? I can’t see a thing.’ (Rosencrantz)
‘You can still think, can’t you?’ (Guildenstern)
‘I think so.’ (Rosencrantz)
‘You can still talk.’ (Guildenstern)
‘What should I say?’ (Rosencrantz)
‘Don’t bother. You can feel, can’t you?’ (Guildenstern)
‘Ah! There’s life in me yet.’ (Rosencrantz)

It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead…which should make all the difference…shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in the box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air – you’d wake up dead, for a start, and then where would you be? Apart from inside a box.

And yet it doesn’t seem enough; to have breathed such significance. Can that be all? And why us? – anybody would have done. And we have contributed nothing.

Death followed by eternity…the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

Let us keep things in proportion. Assume, if you like, that they’re going to kill him. Well, he is a man, he is mortal, death comes to us all, etcetera, and consequently he would have died anyway, sooner or later.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d known that we were lost. (He sits.) A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.