An appropriate end to BL2 with Beckett’s Endgame. The folks in class were able to connect Clov’s windows to Television and restricted views it promotes (Ahmed reminds us that the world is more than CNN’s square of space), enabling a wonderful conversation about the irony of ceratin positions on globalization, media, and attitudes about knowledge.

Hamm says, “One day you’ll be blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me.”

I didn’t mention terminal paradoxes, but the arc of semester pretty much revealed itself, the story of the course finding resolution, its end suggested by its beginning. Hamm and Clov’s point of view is restricted to their own stagnant space. They aren’t Wordsworth remembering walks at the Abbey, nor do they share Blake’s passion for the devil. The world is different. Not the same England. This was one small window into the story of British Literature. Barbauld to Beckett. Youth to age, age to youth. Life to death. Ideas to Hamm asking for Clov to think one. Clov never leaves. He can’t, perhaps, get out of the story.

The end of the semester is a sad time because it’s a favorite thing of mine to sit with people and talk about the good stuff week in and week out. But it must end.