#happy days samuel beckett

[hangsawoman]

happy days by samuel beckett annotated by my friend

[cinematic-literature]

L'amica geniale S02E04 (Il bacio)

Book title: Il teatro di Samuel Beckett (1961) by Samuel Beckett

The plays included in this Einaudi edition are

Aspettando Godot (Waiting for Godot in English; 1949)

Finale di partita (Endgame in English; 1957)

Atto senza parole (Act Without Words in English; 1957)

Tutti quelli che cadono (All That Fall in English; 1956)

L'ultimo nastro di Krapp (Krapp's Last Tape in English; 1958)

Ceneri (Embers in English; 1958)

Atto senza parole II (Act Without Words II in English; 1959)

Giorni felici (Happy Days in English; 1961)

[euridise]

Getting by

[consilio-cameos]

who want to complete an absurd duo while doing nothing and only waiting for the end (of what?) without wanting or not to leave, with me? 🥺💖

[stephendedalus]

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett

[guplay]

啊，美好的一天！Happy Days！------ 2023年夏天在阿那亚演出

[jondambacher]

First Look! The last few months I’ve been working diligently on designing & directing an upcoming production of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” — Opening March 17th at Chicago’s City Lit Theater. The set, the mound that’s slowly consuming the protagonist, was made exclusively of recycled materials. Her world consists of collapsed materials, musique concrete, isolation & electricity.

[thecoleopterawithana]

Even though John is under-powered in this period we still see what made him so magnetic to Paul and to others around him. There is a scene early in Part Two that I find riveting. It takes place a couple of days after George has left. The status of everything - the project, the band - remains uncertain, but they are ploughing on for now. John, Yoko, Ringo, Paul and some of the crew are sitting in a semi-circle. Paul looks pensive. Ringo looks tired. John is speaking only in deadpan comic riffs, to which Paul responds now and again. Peter Sellers comes in and sits down, looks ill-at-ease, and leaves having barely said a word, unable to penetrate the Beatle bubble. At some point they’re joined by Lindsay-Hogg, and the conversation dribbles on. John mentions that he had to leave an interview that morning in order to throw up (he and Yoko had taken heroin the night before). Paul, looking into space rather than addressing anyone in particular, attempts to turn the conversation towards what they’re meant to be doing:

Paul: See, what we need is a serious program of work. Not an endless rambling among the canyons of your mind.

John: Take me on that trip upon that golden ship of shores… We’re all together, boy.

Paul: To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip.

John: And when I touch you, I feel happy inside. I can’t hide, I can’t hide. [pause] Ask me why, I’ll say I love you.

Paul: What we need is a schedule.

John: A garden schedule.

I mean first of all, who is writing this incredible dialogue? Samuel Beckett?

Let’s break it down a little. The first thing to note is that John and Paul are talking to each other without talking to each other. This is partly because they’re aware of the cameras and also because they’re just not sure how to communicate with each other at the moment. John’s contributions are oblique, gnomic, riddling, comprised only of songs and jokes, like the Fool in King Lear. Take me on that trip upon that golden ship of shores sounds like a Lennonised version of a line from Dylan’s Tambourine Man (“take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship”). “We’re altogether, boy”? I have no idea. Does Paul? I think John expects Paul to understand him because he has such faith in what they used to call their “heightened awareness”, a dreamlike, automatic connection to each other’s minds. But right now, Paul is not much in the mood for it. His speech is more direct, though he too adopts a quasi-poetic mode (“canyons of your mind” is borrowed from a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band) and he can’t bring himself to make eye contact. “To wander aimlessly is very unswinging,” he says (another great line, I will pin it above my writing desk). Then John does something amazing: he starts talking in Beatle, dropping in lyrics from the early years of the band, I Want To Hold Your Hand and Ask Me Why. (To appreciate John’s response to Paul’s mention of a schedule, American readers may need reminding that English people pronounce it “shed - dule”.)

What’s going on throughout this exchange? Maybe Lennon is just filling dead air, or playing to the gallery, but I think he is (also) attempting to communicate to Paul in their shared code - something like he loves him, he loves The Beatles, they’re still in this together. Of course, we can’t know. I can’t hide, John says, hiding behind his wordplay.

— Ian Leslie, "The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back" (January 26, 2022).

[I was curious to read more of Ian Leslie's approach to the Beatles in general and Lennon-McCartney in particular, since he's currently writing a book about John and Paul's relationship: “John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs". He's also the author of that New York Times opinion piece that came out today.]

[april-is]

April 29, 2023: June, Alex Dimitrov

June Alex Dimitrov

There will never be more of summer than there is now. Walking alone through Union Square I am carrying flowers and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. It’s Sunday and the trains run on time but today death feels so far, it’s impossible to go underground. I would like to say something to everyone I see (an entire city) but I’m unsure what it is yet. Each time I leave my apartment there’s at least one person crying, reading, or shouting after a stranger anywhere along my commute. It’s possible to be happy alone, I say out loud and to no one so it’s obvious, and now here in the middle of this poem. Rarely have I felt more charmed than on Ninth Street, watching a woman stop in the middle of the sidewalk to pull up her hair like it’s an emergency—and it is. People do know they’re alive. They hardly know what to do with themselves. I almost want to invite her with me but I’ve passed and yes it’d be crazy like trying to be a poet, trying to be anyone here. How do you continue to love New York, my friend who left for California asks me. It’s awful in the summer and winter, and spring and fall last maybe two weeks. This is true. It’s all true, of course, like my preference for difficult men which I had until recently because at last, for one summer the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine is walking through this first humid day with my hands full, not at all peaceful but entirely possible and real.

--

(June is my birthday month and also the best month. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.)

More like this:   » Steps, Frank O'Hara   » After Work, Richard Jones   » Dolores Park, Keetje Kuipers   » Awaking in New York, Maya Angelou   » A Step Away From Them, Frank O'Hara

Today in: 

2022: Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay 2021: Choi Jeong Min, Franny Choi 2020: Earl, Louis Jenkins 2019: Kul, Fatimah Asghar 2018: My Life Was the Size of My Life, Jane Hirshfield 2017: I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Ever Been, Hanif Abdurraqib 2016: Tired, Langston Hughes 2015: Democracy, Langston Hughes 2014: Postscript, Seamus Heaney 2013: The Ghost of Frank O’Hara, John Yohe 2012: All Objects Reveal Something About the Body, Catie Rosemurgy 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe 2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn 2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher 2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett 2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok 2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath 2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

[belacqui-pro-quo]

Well anyway – this man Shower – or Cooker – no matter – and the woman – hand in hand – in the other hands bags – kind of big brown grips – standing there gaping at me – and at last this man Shower – or Cooker – ends in ’er anyway – stake my life on that – What’s she doing? he says – What’s the idea? he says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground – coarse fellow – What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? – and so on – lot more stuff like that – usual drivel – Do you hear me? he says – I do, she says, God help me – What do you mean, he says, God help you? [Stops filing, raises head, gazes front.] And you, she says, what’s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean? Is it because you’re still on your two flat feet, with your old ditty full of tinned muck and changes of underwear, dragging me up and down this fornicating wilderness, coarse creature, fit mate – [with sudden violence] – let go of my hand and drop for God’s sake, she says, drop! [Pause. Resumes filing.] Why doesn’t he dig her out? he says – referring to you, my dear – What good is she to him like that? – What good is he to her like that? – and so on – usual tosh – Good! she says, have a heart for God’s sake – Dig her out, he says, dig her out, no sense in her like that – Dig her out with what? she says – I’d dig her out with my bare hands, he says – must have been man and – wife. [Files in silence.] Next thing they’re away – hand in hand – and the bags – dim – then gone – last human kind – to stray this way.

— Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

[simikae]

pair of rabbits

1) a year with frog and toad, willie reale 2) midsummer night’s dream, wikipedia 3) rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, tom stoppard 4) on the romance of cannibalism, silas denver melvin 5) happy days, samuel beckett

[onenakedfarmer]

SAMUEL BECKETT Happy Days

Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye.

[rebeccalouisaferguson]

Rebecca Ferguson: The first to ask questions in the intview

Ferguson calls via videocall from London and takes the interview in her own hands.

Rebecca Ferguson: Before we start I'd like to ask whats there behind you on the table. Sorry, I like to see through zoom-interviews the rooms of my intviewers.

ICONIST: What particular are you interested in?

Ferguson: The first book in the pile, for example.

ICONIST: I have to take a look for myself now. Here, "Bill Gates. How the prevent the next pandemic."

Ferguson: Oh. Does Bill have some good advice in it?

ICONIST: It's complicated. Gates had already warned of the dangers of such pandemics before the Covid outbreak. He later received death threats because one of his quotes, taken out of context, was used to create the grotesque fake news that he wanted to use the corona virus to microchip all of humanity. With that, we could now seamlessly move on to the conspiracies in your new series, Silo, in which no one knows which stories about human threats are true and which are fabricated.

Ferguson: *laughs* You are right.

ICONIST: The world has been destroyed, 10,000 people have survived in an underground silo, locked up there, isolated from the outside world. Nobody knows what really happened outside. You're not entirely wrong to take this as a depressing parable of the pandemic, are you?

Ferguson: There are certainly many parallels to events that happened not so long ago - the horror of the Covid lockdowns, governments wanting to control their environment, scarcity of resources and the need to recycle in order to survive. Only the novels on which the series is based have been published since 2011. And as an actress, what interests me most is the quality of the storytelling and the characters. When I was working on this role, I didn't think too much about whether the future society in the film had anything to do with today's society. To be honest, I don't want to think about the future of the world because sometimes it gets me pretty depressed. I am aware that I lead a very privileged life and that I am very fortunate. Don't get me wrong: it's important to me to speak my mind, for example I'm fighting for equality at every level. I accept those battles that I am convinced I must fight. Other than that, I just try to be friendly to others.

ICONIST: Your series about the silo society offers less action-packed science fiction escapism, instead it relies more on dialogue. It is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's end-time visions in his play "Happy Days" - with two actors who are stuck in a mound of earth after an apocalypse, sink into it and console themselves with purposeful optimism about their hopeless situation.

Ferguson: I love your reference to Samuel Beckett *laughs* Makes perfect sense. I've done a lot of research on depression and trauma to better understand the loneliness, grief, and loss that weighs on my character. And I like philosophy. The theses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, for example, both of which assume the natural equality of human beings, i.e. that humans are good by nature and only become evil through society. It was interesting to transfer such thoughts to the film, to ask oneself: What happens when you condense this thesis and show what happens when many people are isolated in a room closed off from the outside world? And when down there one lie about the alleged causes of the catastrophe is followed by another. Do people rebel against lies? Regardless of the penalties they face? Those were the basic questions that fascinated me about this series.

ICONIST: The series is based on Hugh Howey's internationally successful best-selling trilogy "Wool", which is adored by fans. Did you feel pressure to live up to expectations? There are enough examples of film adaptations of fantasy and science fiction novels that have been torn apart by fans.

Ferguson: No, I didn't feel any pressure. It's great that this book series was so successful and has so many fans. I can only do my best. If people don't like it, that's unfortunate, but then there's nothing you can do about it. However, before I engage more intensely with such a role, I always do a lot of research on fan sites. I spend hours reading all sorts of things there.

ICONIST: Why are you doing that?

Ferguson: Because I often discover interesting details on these sites. For example, if a fan writes, "I love how the author describes how Juliette keeps her hand in a pocket the whole time." That's a small but significant detail. I said to myself, "Great, I'm going to do this the whole time through the shoot."

ICONIST: You say you don't like to think about the future too often. In a podcast "Spark Hunter" published in 2022, you dealt with the currently much discussed topic of the future of artificial intelligence. Actress Trudie Styler, wife of Sting, directed. What appealed to you about recording a podcast – actually more of a radio play – in addition to all your film commitments?

Ferguson: I like Trudie very much. When she called me one day and asked, "Do you want to do a radio play with actor Mark Rylance?" I immediately said, "If Mark Rylance is in, I'll be in, no matter what it is." Then sent me the scripts and I got scared at first.

ICONIST: Why?

Ferguson: Because it was pretty complicated stuff, with a lot of details about AI. It was just hard to understand at first. Mark Rylance voicing the inventor of a female artificial intelligence robot whom I speak. And then suddenly this robot starts to develop feelings, it takes pleasure in provocation and in questioning society. And reveals morbid feelings about human life - it's brilliant.

ICONIST: Sting also has a small speaking role in the podcast. In 1984 he had an unforgettable scene as an actor in David Lynch's film adaptation of "Dune - the desert planet" as the villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. There he stands with an oiled naked body, only wearing a futuristic loincloth, which he himself once described as the "first example of flying underpants".

(Rebecca Ferguson is laughing)

You can be seen as Lady Jessica in Dennis Villeneuve's remake of Dune. While working on the podcast, did you and Sting talk a bit about how sci-fi staging has changed over the past 40 years?

Ferguson: We actually did. I remember sitting with him and his wife at a table in their beautiful home at their winery in Tuscany. At one of our long dinners, I asked him, "Do you know what I'm filming?" "No," he said, "what?" Then I revealed to him that we were remaking Dune. And then his eyes suddenly lit up and we went on a long journey in our conversation, talking about what it was like shooting the first film back then, compared to the new one.

ICONIST: And the flying underpants?

Ferguson: (laughs) I won't give you any details, that's between Sting and me.

ICONIST: In winter comes the second part of the Dune film adaptation, in which you again play Lady Jessica, the mother of the young hero Paul Atreides. In the summer you can also be seen again as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust alongside Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" - and already in the ten parts of the Apple TV series "Silo". it doesn't get any better. Aren't you afraid of overexposure?

Ferguson: No. This is going to be a big year for me, with three very different film productions that I'm very proud of. Things like that don't happen all the time. I don't worry too much about it. I'm damn happy it turned out that way. You never know if something like this will happen again. Actors often come into the limelight very quickly, but then just as quickly go out of fashion. Age is often not helpful either. In that sense, I feel like I'm in a good place right now. I've been very lucky.

ICONIST: It is your third appearance in the Mission: Impossible series and your second in Dune. Is it also important for you to have something like consistency in big blockbusters, in times of intensifying competition between film studios and streaming providers with an unprecedented oversupply of films, in which there are also rows and rows of flops?

Ferguson: It's actually nice that I now know my role in "Mission: Impossible" well, because working on the set is complicated because we often don't have finished scripts. Working on the Mission: Impossible movies is so different from other movies. But that's what makes it so exciting. I know my role, but I'm always getting to know new actors who are in for the first time. In their eyes, I can immediately see what they're thinking when they're on set for the first time: "What the hell…?" Then I just think to myself: "I know that, I felt the same way at first." Then it's nice, when you are already familiar with your role. Lady Jessica in "Dune" is also a cool woman. In the second part, however, she is changed. I won't reveal any details now. Just this much: Your performances in the second part are so different from those in the first that it felt like I was playing a new person.

ICONIST: What does it do to you when you switch from one large-scale production to the next?

Ferguson: Well, while I was shooting Silo, I got a message that I had to do some reshoots on the Mission: Impossible movie. I love that kind of thing yeah You always think you need breaks. Until it suddenly: "We need you for four days in June to reshoot scenes for 'Mission: Impossible'." Then you're suddenly sucked in again. I love that because I love the roles too. It sure would be bad if I had to work on set in a terrible environment. That's not the case. It is great.

translated from German by @edwardslovelyelizabeth exclusively for @rebeccalouisaferguson

[thesobsister]

Local bears rehearsing for their production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

[timptoe]

When Genocide Is the Best Option

I played the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time during the summer of 2022, and it broke my brain. So I played it again over the last six months, trying to figure out why it did what it did to me, and after finishing it again last week, I’ve had the same reaction of intense grief I did the first time. I know I’m a newbie and a decade late to this game, but I’ve tried to piece together what it is about the ending that’s so brilliant and so terrible. And in true English major form, I’ve written 3000 words to try and exorcise it from my head.

It starts with the ending of Stranger Than Fiction.

In Stranger Than Fiction, a boring accountant named Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell in the best performance of his career) one day starts hearing a voice in his head (Emma Thompson, my love), narrating his life. It’s annoying, but bearable, up until the day he adjusts the time on his wristwatch and the Author says, “Little did he know this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”

Understandably perturbed, Harold seeks to prevent this, ultimately by seeking the Author out and trying to convince her not to finish typing out the book and, presumably, his death. (The unexplained magical realism in this movie is absurdity on par with Samuel Beckett, I can’t tell you how much I love it.) She handwrites the ending for him to see, and Harold shows it to a Professor friend (Dustin Hoffman!) who tells him, “Even if you avoid this death, another will find you and I guarantee that it won't be nearly as poetic or meaningful as what she's written.” And Harold agrees once he reads it too, because in it, he saves a little boy. Isn’t that what we all want, for the end of our stories to have meaning?

But the Author ends up changing the ending. When the Professor reads the finished story with the new, happier ending where both the boy and Harold live, he’s clearly disappointed. They have this exchange:

Professor: It's okay. It's not bad. It's not the most amazing piece of English literature in several years. But it's okay. Author: I think I’m fine with okay. Professor: Why did you change the book? Author: Lots of reasons. I realized I just couldn't do it. Professor: Because he's real? Author: Because it's a book about a man who doesn't know he's about to die and then dies. But if the man does know he's going to die and dies anyway, dies willingly, knowing he could stop it, then...I mean, isn't that the type of man you want to keep alive?

Shepard is the type of person you want to keep alive.

The series does a good job of getting us attached to Shepard, so it’s natural that we want a happy ending for them. We want The Good Ending. And we’ve been trained by the last century-or-so of western fiction heroes’ journies to expect The Good Ending, too. We expect Frodo and Sam to be rescued from Mount Doom by the eagles. We expect Cloud to beat Sephiroth and come out the other side, whole. And even when the protagonist does die—think the Hero of Fereldan choosing not to sleep with Morrigan, or the wipeout of the team in Rogue One, or the dad dying in Life Is Beautiful—it’s usually a sacrifice ultimately in service of The Good Ending. The world is left better because of the hero’s death—a choice that isn’t really a choice, because we expect The Good Ending. 

But instead, at the very last moment, Mass Effect throws us into the cruelest version of the Trolley Problem imaginable.

On track one, if you choose to keep the trolley on its original path, you Destroy all AI. Which means you kill a valued member of your crew and an entire race of sentient synthetics in cold blood. Sure, Shepard (probably) lives at the very end, but this is definitionally Not The Good Ending. The hero can’t commit genocide and still be the hero. And the idea that Shepard could live with themselves after making that choice isn’t consistent with Paragon morality. Maybe if your Shepard is a Renegade, they become an antihero in this moment, but it’s still not The Good Ending as we understand it.

So jump to track two, and choose to Control the trolley and drive it away from death toward new purpose. Which is fine, except that a) the whole arc of the third game shows that Control isn’t possible and is actually evil, embodied in the mission of Cerberus and the person of the Illusive Man; and b) Shepard is then no longer Shepard at the end of the story—they’ve lost the humanity they’ve been fighting so desperately to preserve, stripped away to become the closest thing the galaxy has to a god. Maybe they’re a good god for a hundred years, or even a thousand, but maybe the Leviathans’ Intelligence was, too. Can we expect Shepard-without-humanity not to eventually turn into the Catalyst? To say that the only way to save humanity is to “preserve” it? Renegade Shepard even says in the epilogue, “I will destroy those who threaten the future of the many”; Paragon Shepard’s version, “I will act as guardian for the many,” isn’t much better. Who decides who’s the many? Autocracy can’t be The Good Ending.

Track three’s gotta be The Good Ending then, right? The game certainly presents it as such: Synthesis, the ultimate bridge of understanding between organics and synthetics. The only way to truly achieve peace, argues the Catalyst. It’s the central option in that final chamber, it’s the shortest path to walk to, it’s literally colored lifestream!green. And it’s a completely violation of the bodily autonomy of every living creature in the entire galaxy. The body horror’s real on this one, y’all. I actually picked Synthesis on my first playthrough because of how clearly it was presented as The Good Ending, but watching the epilogue…I mean, it’s great for EDI. Probably great for Joker too. But then I saw the little green circuitry flash across James’s face during Shepard’s memorial and I thought, This guy? The body-as-a-temple guy? No way he’s okay with any of this. Imposing your will on an entire galaxy full of sentient beings feels inconsistent with The Good Ending.

Those are our choices in the final moments of the game. And honestly, the most nearly moral choice is probably track one. Control, at best, pauses the cycle until AI Shepard decides to start the cycle of reaping again. Synthesis takes away the freedom of all sentient creatures—even those who aren’t spacefaring yet, which: imagine if we today suddenly got Synthesized, the chaos that that would bring—to be themselves. So we’re left with Destroy. Think about that. From a certain point of view, genocide is the most nearly moral decision. Which means there is no moral decision.

There is no Good Ending.

In trying to come to terms with the ending, I’ve read a lot of takes about how the writing is bad. I just don’t think that’s the case. I rather think it’s some of the most brilliant writing in Bioware’s canon, precisely because it’s so uncomfortable. Maybe the Choice comes a little bit out of nowhere, though it’s vaguely hinted at in certain descriptions of the Crucible War Assets, like how the Crucible “tunes into the mass relays' command switches” for “the safe discharge of tremendous amounts of energy”, producing “some kind of energetic pulse that might pass through the magnetosphere of a planet unimpeded.” But even if the Choice is a swerve, the choices aren’t. Destroy has been Shepard’s mission from day one. Control is set up as an alternate option starting at Mars. And Synthesis is hinted at as The Good Ending by EDI, the Leviathan, and Legion.

And let’s talk about Legion for a minute, and why the Geth/Quarian peace doesn’t affect the conversation with the Catalyst. My first playthrough, I was aghast that silver-tongued Shepard wasn’t able to argue with the Catalyst that none of the options were necessary, that the Geth/Quarian peace proves all three choices are unnecessary, that everything’ll be alright with a little grit and empathy. Shepard’s able to argue (and convince) damn near everyone else in the series of almost anything; it feels like bad writing not to let them do that with the Catalyst, too.

Except for two things. First, Shepard is actively bleeding out. They’re barely conscious when the platform takes them up into the Crucible, not exactly up for a rigorous Lincoln-Douglass debate. But second, and more importantly, the Catalyst is an unreliable actor. The Leviathians’ Intelligence that becomes the Catalyst has one—and only one—purpose: to stop the chaos of organic/synthetic antagonism. The cycle of reaping works for millenia until, finally, a creature actually makes it through the Citadel and onto the precipice of firing the Crucible. That’s never happened before. And more to the point, the Catalyst can’t stop the creature; it has no corporeal form. So the Catalyst has to come up with a new plan: rather than allow the creature to Destroy its solution or, worse, supplant it as the new source of Control, the Catalyst needs to convince the creature to go through with Synthesis. I’m willing to bet the Catalyst would rather just kill Shepard and continue the cycle of reaping, but it knows that that’s no longer possible, so Synthesis is its best remaining option. It has every reason to lie to Shepard, to cajole Shepard into making that choice. It is utterly consistent in its motivations.

In other words, it’s good writing, even if it’s terribly inconsistent with The Good Ending we’ve come to expect.

(As an aside, I know from bad writing: I’m a refugee from Final Fantasy. FFVI was my first—and still my favorite—RPG; FFVII and its followups are brilliant, FFVIII has some of my favorite characters, FFX is a theological treatise better than anything I read in seminary. But FFXIII and especially FFXV are complete and utter garbage. Hollow characters. Unearned conflicts. Absurd twists with no basis in the narrative. A storytelling mode that’s so rigid as to be unbearable. And FFXV’s ending! No pathos, no resolution, the barest connection to anything else in the story, just a huge timejump and then “kill the bad guy.” Uuuuuugh.)

In teasing out the deep grief I felt after beating Mass Effect the first time, I was surprised at the type of grief it is. It’s not the sharp grief of the loss of love, like I felt when my mother-in-law died or when my wife miscarried twice. It’s not the dull grief of the loss of innocence, like when I left home for the last time or when I watched the towers fall on TV. It took a while to process, but I think it’s the grief of the loss of purpose, the same lingering malaise I felt when I finally realized my career of twenty years was actively bad and I had to leave it behind. Mass Effect’s ending is so hard because we want Shepard either to live, or at least to have a “poetic and meaningful” death, and they don’t. They live, they become a mass murderer; they die, they become everything they’ve fought against. That single choice has the effect of making everything before the Crucible feel purposeless. 

And yet.

There’s a quote I like from Beckett that goes:

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

Art is not always meant to comfort us. Sometimes, it’s meant to break us and then, a la Hemingway, help us become “stronger in the broken places.” Beckett and the absurdists and the existentialists get that on a deep level: there’s always An Ending, rarely is it a Good Ending, and sometimes what you do before and after the ending matters more than the ending itself. And I think that’s where I finally get to with Mass Effect: yeah, the ending is absurd and purposeless. And that’s the point.

I want desperately for Shepard to get The Good Ending because Shepard is the type of person you want to keep alive. I want Mass Effect 3 to end like Mass Effect 1, with Shepard’s companions wondering where they are, and then they run up a piece of debris like a conquering hero for all to see. I want to see my Shepard reunite with Kaidan, to run across the scorched battlefield of London into a fierce embrace and say, “I would never leave you behind, not really, not forever. Not again. Never again.” And he doesn’t. And that sucks.

And there is a deep beauty in fighting until you can’t anymore, in making the only choice you can because it’s still your choice, in finding new purpose after The Good Ending, or The Not-So-Good Ending, because if Mass Effect is about anything it’s about endurance. We will endure this war because we have to. I will endure this pain because I have no choice. Life keeps going because life keeps going with no reason or rhyme so it’s our job to make a reason, to invent purpose where none exists, because that’s what we do.

Existence is absurd. Doubly so in a universe like Mass Effect’s, filled with aliens who wield feckless power and technology that is indecipherable and an enemy who is fundamentally Other. For Beckett, the response to that absurdity is a happy, mighty “fuck you.” Maybe you can get The Good Ending if you try hard enough. Maybe there’s never any such thing as The Good Ending. None of that’s the point anyway because, again, existence is absurd—so fuck you, my life has meaning because I say it does. My choices have meaning because I say they do. We have purpose because we say we do. 

As Shepard says, “However insignificant we may be, we will fight. We will sacrifice. And we will find a way. That’s what humans do.”

I’m left conflicted about the next game. A huge part of me—the part that loves the twist in Stranger Than Fiction, the part that’s all about redemption and grace and simplicity—wants the game to be “The Search for Shep.” And I think if it is, it’ll negate the purposelessness and terrible beauty of the ending to Mass Effect 3, which would be an absolute shame. The ending of the Mass Effect trilogy is so powerful because it forces you to find meaning in the journey, not in the ending itself. It turned the whole series on its head for me at least because, honestly, I didn’t really like it during my first playthrough. I mean, it was…fine? Some good characters, some good lines, but kind of a mundane military FPS. Halo with space wizards. But it’s that ending, that existentially absurd ending, that lifts the rest of the series into high literature. (Not that I’m down on fix-it fics, mind you. There’s no work of literature that isn’t elevated by fanfiction. Hell, I’m writing my own fix-it fic from Joker’s POV! I’m just…conflicted about what to do with canon, which is another thing that makes me think it’s good writing after all.)

So that’s where I am. Never thought Mass Effect would jump into my top five favorite games ever, but here we are. It helped me come to terms with some pretty deep feelings I didn’t know were still in me, in the way good literature does. I’ll be chewing on this one for a long, long time. And lucky for me, the state of the fandom ten years after the trilogy ended is so robust that I’m in good company. Got a lot more thoughts, but I’ll stop there. Thanks, friends.

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.  - Kay Eiffel, The Author, Stranger Than Fiction

[quotation--marks]

The island. A last effort. The islet. The shore facing the open sea is jagged with creeks. One could live there, perhaps happy, if life was a possible thing, but nobody lives there. The deep water comes washing into its heart, between high walls of rock. One day nothing will remain of it but two islands, separated by a gulf, narrow at first then wider and wider as the centuries slip by, two islands, two reefs. It is difficult to speak of man, under such conditions.

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (trans. Samuel Beckett)