Saturday, December 29, 2007

Samuel Beckett, "Krapp's Last Tape," short clip

Portrait of the character as a young man.




Though I've never seen it, or even read it, I love the idea of this play. A man finds a tape of himself that he made years before as a youth. He listens to his young voice, his earlier ideas and ideals, and wonders about who that person is. His young self is a stranger to him now. Which makes me wonder, where is our identity? Time moves so quickly that as soon as we've grown comfortable with something, it's changed, and often before we've even realized it.

In short, who am I at this moment in time?

3 comments:

Chicken And Waffles said...

Genius. On both counts.

Editor said...

A theme Beckett revisited time and time again. Looking at oneself and seeing things one might not want to see. No one does it better.

Julie said...

Tod, my university here somehow obtained all kinds of Beckett's papers recently. I should know much more about him than I do, being a scholar of French literature and all (I know he's not really French, but he kind of is) but I don't. I might tackle it, though, because he's amazing.