Narcotics

I must say that I opened up Beckett with doubts in my mind. I am a novice in literature, and with Dr. Sexson feeding us the lie that we will not like Beckett, I was not entirely looking forward to reading him--and I mean that my stomach did not fill up with fluttering butterflies as it did prior to opening Nabokov. But once again I was decieved.

Exactly two sentences into Molloy, I whispered a freindly curse into the air and saw it flitter away, of course headed in the direction of that Old Proteus Dr. Sexson. Now I have seven lifetimes of study in front of me (Finnigins Wake is one of them), and in every one I sweat up steep mountains and slither through twisted caves, and stumble through choked valleys, only to find myself where I began. I say freindly curse because it had in it no hate, no malignant nature. It was a forehead-slapping, lightly chuckling curse which would only tickle or gently slap him--it wouldn't do any real harm.
No, it is a love-hate relationship I have with Dr. Sexson. He is my drug dealer. I need him more than he needs me. He dishes me out little samples here and there, and smiles, and always tricks me and teases me and keeps me on my toes. He is a trickster. Now he has given me a new drug to try--it is called Beckett, and it's reeelly good stuff, man. The only problem is, he gives me too much of it. I have stacked in my house mountains of drugs to consume, more than can be done in any lifetime, and he just keeps giving me more to pile on. And then he tells me to have it all done and sniffed up by the end of the week and I say

"Hey, man, I gotta take my time with this stuff. I gotta enjoy it.

rome wasn't built in a day, man."

We all, of course, know that the beautiful yarn he wove for us the last two days in class was all made up, all fiction. Dr. Sexson lives a fictional life and is therefore more real than any one of us. Or maybe not. Maybe it was real and Dr. Sexson encountered his Dopellganger upon that misty plane. Or maybe the old lady was a ghost. Perhaps the other passengers saw Michael talking and motioning as he sat alone in the seats, and they gave him wide berth. Perhaps, then and there upon that fictional plane, Dr. Sexson lived out a lifetime in twenty minutes--one filled with allegorical stories and death and the fight for life using an immortal tool of the Gods: stories. It is something to ponder.