Watt

by Samuel Beckett

This seat, the property very likely of the municipality, or of the public, was of course not his, but he thought of it as his. This was Mr. Hackett’s attitude towards things that pleased him. He knew they were not his, but he thought of them as his. He knew they were not his, because they pleased him.

Too fearful to assume himself the onus of a decision, said Mr. Hackett, he refers it to the frigid machinery of a time-space relation.

Watt’s smile was further peculiar in this, that it seldom came singly, but was followed after a short time by another, less pronounced it is true. In this it resembled the fart. And it even sometimes happened that a third, very weak and fleeting, was found necessary, before the face could be at rest again. But this was rare. And it will be a long time now before Watt smiles again, unless something very unexpected turns up, to upset him.

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Not that Watt desired information, for he did not. But he desired words to be applied to his situation, to Mr. Knott, to the house, to the grounds, to his duties, to the stairs, to his bedroom, to the kitchen, and in a general way to the conditions of being in which he found himself. For Watt now found himself in the midst of things which, if they consented to be named, did so as it were with reluctance.

For once on the first floor Watt lost sight of the ground floor, and interest in the ground floor. This was indeed a merciful coincidence, was it not, that at the moment of Watt’s losing sight of the ground floor, he lost interest in it also.

Watt conceived for Mr. Graves a feeling little short of liking. In particular Mr. Graves’s way of speaking did not displease Watt. Mr. Graves pronounced his th charmingly. Turd and fart, he said, for third and fourth. Watt liked these venerable saxon words. And when Mr. Graves, drinking on the sunny step his afternoon stout, looked up with a twinkle in his old blue eye, and said, in mock deprecation, Tis only me turd or fart, then Watt felt he was perhaps prostituting himself to some purpose.

Mr. Graves seemed to have reached the age at which the failure to get on with one’s wife is more generally a cause of satisfaction than of repining.

Watt did not know whether he was glad or sorry that he did not see Mr. Knott more often. In one sense he was sorry, and in another glad. And the sense in which he was sorry was this, that he wished to see Mr. Knott face to face, and the sense in which he was glad was this, that he feared to do so. Yes indeed, in so far as he wished, in so far as he feared, to see Mr. Knott face to face, his wish made him sorry, his fear glad, that he saw him so seldom, and at such a great distance as a rule, and so fugitively, and so often sideways on, and even from behind.

Then one fine day, of unparallelled brightness and turbulence, I found my steps impelled, as though by some external agency, towards the fence; and this impulsion was maintained, until I could go no further, in that direction, without doing myself a serious, if not fatal, injury; then it left me and I looked about, a thing I never used to do, on any account, in the ordinary way. How hideous is the semi-colon.