Patrick’s Endgame When Words Fall on Deaf Ears

“I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” – Samuel Becket, Endgame

Before he went to Rockaway Beach to bury himself in sand up to his neck, Patrick said to me: “People ask me where I’ve been, and I tell them I’ve gone within to a place that’s so damn dim I can’t see them anymore. Then listen up, they tell me, to what’s going down these days, but my ears are blocked, yet they won’t stop, their tongues just flop like socks.”

He worr...