Waiting for Godot
Performed across the globe by some of the world's most iconic performers, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece remains an unwavering testament of what it means to be human. From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius … Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.” The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
31mentions
31people
2009–2026years
32% recommend65% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You're making me aware of that larger point, though it may have been implicit.
And the thing is that I love Waiting for Godot, so I could make a strong pitch.
I've just read an interview with the writer, David Goyer:
https://variety.com/2021/tv/features/foundation-apple-adapta...
It's frustrating and I'm not sure why. I think it's because Goyer didn't realize that the 80's books were fan fiction.
Isaac Asimov was always his own biggest fan.
If you write an adaptation of the Foundation series that focuses on Gaal Dornick you're working with a prequel.
The only good prequel ever made is Godfather II, right?
Because a good story starts as late as it possibly can.
So in this case, self-referential or not, Goyer was doomed. He's basing the series on some very bad books.
- Short stories by Haruki Murakami - The Elephant Vanishes
Waiting for Godot (play) - Beckett
Neuromancer - Gibson
- Not to start a flame war over book choice but forcing kids to read the Bible, Homer's Iliad, and Shakespeare are probably what is causing such marked disinterest in the first place. There are so many interesting and valuable works of writing, fiction and non-fiction, that can captivate and entertain modern children that aren't unapproachable tomes translated from ancient, dead languages, or written in Iambic Pentameter.
One of the first plays I read that actually interested me in Theater was Waiting for Godot. Reading The Stranger in high school exposed me to so many new and complex ideas. Even extremely recent books like "Something that May Shock and Discredit You" by Daniel M. Lavery or "Trick Mirror" by Jia Tolentino are fascinating works of the modern American Canon. I'm not Polish but I'm sure there are equally relevant works in Polish.
If you think kids just prefer to watch a "movie based on a book" maybe stop making them read boring books that truly lack lots of meaningful relevance to their lives today.
And seriously, stop making kids read The Bible as a literary lesson. Nothing made me dis-engage in school like being told "I know you're Jewish and this feels like proselytizing, but I promise, this is purely a lesson in literature, nothing more". That is proven to be a lie when King James's edition is selected over an English translation of the Torah, and when no other non-Christian religious texts are selected for literary evaluation...
- book suggestions are like opinions: everyone has a few ... fwiw here books which I re-read more than twice:
1) Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society (La Technique)": https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
2) Jacques Ellul "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
3) Robert Cialdini "Influence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini#Theory_of_infl... <- could probably be described as a modern / dark adversarial take in "how to make friends and influence people" and should be read with Kahneman & Tversky's books/papers.
4) James C. Scott "The Art of Not being Governed" https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf
5) Dickens "Hard Times" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel) <- for it's description of the effects on peasant communities during industrialization, which is also a theme in "La Technique" above
6) George Orwell "Down and Out in London and Paris" https://archive.org/details/DownAndOutInParisAndLondonGeorge...
7) M. Scott Peck "The Road Less Traveled" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...
8) Introducing Psychology of Relationships - A Practical Guide by John Karter https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Psychology-Relationships-...
9) Lion Feuchtwanger "Goya" https://www.amazon.com/Goya-Lion-Feuchtwanger/dp/8476408838
10) Thomas Ligotti "The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror" https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-against-Human-Race-Contriv...
11) Plato "The Republic": https://archive.org/details/PlatoRepublic/mode/2up
12) Lewis Mumford "The Story of Utopias": https://archive.org/details/storyutopias00mumfgoog/page/n9/m...
13) the major works of: Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Chomsky, Zizek
Short:
- Peter Wessel Zapffe "The Last Messiah": https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah
- Lion Feuchtwanger "Power": https://archive.org/details/powerbookbylionf00zieliala/page/...
- Samuel Becket "Waiting for Godot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
- Fyodor Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man": https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Ridiculous-Man-Fyodor-Dostoyevs...
- Getting into a habit of exercise is the obvious answer. A less conventional advice that has sometimes worked for me is to totally embrace the feeling of being somber, and binge on some of the classic sort of miserable apathetic existentialist books. Things like Albert Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausia, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Sometimes after I have read those works, after I have stopped trying to ignore the feeling and just went all in for a few days, do I even get bored with being miserable and then start to look for other emotions to experience, and usually they're a lot happier in flavour. Obviously this advice could also exacerbate the problem, so try it at your own risk.
- Only tangentially related to the article, but: if you haven't read any Beckett, you owe it to yourself to check out at least Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two relatively short plays that alternate nicely between black comedy and surreal despair.
