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Saturday, March 29, 2014

Whose Death Is It Anyway?

Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot



From the New Oxonian:
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/doubt-and-darkness/

...Now think of Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the absurd and existentially restless genres of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the drama and music of the period tolled in the death of God and certainty, illustrated by atonality and abandonment of form and the unities of classical aesthetics. On the other hand, we already see this art as periodically limited to the discovery of psychology and the aftermath of nuclear confusion.

In fifty years it will be unreadable except by literary professionals interested in last-century movements. If it means anything in the twenty first century, it underscores David Hart’s comment, “The world is dying of metaphysical boredom.” Atheism is hard pressed to be a solution to that situation, at any level...
I am very much impressed at how the Death of God follows so closely upon the heels of the magnificently grotesque holocausts of the Death of Mankind:  the Sho'a, The World Wars, the slaughters of politics and ideology.

I think there is a connection.

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