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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

The Human Condition [2]

The Human Condition [2]

Over the years (ignoring the philosophers) I have been able to isolate three distinct commonly held views of the human condition – the progressive view, held by most politically minded people, that the human condition is malleable and can be much improved by revolution, legislation, or sheer personal effort; the non-progressive view, held by criminals, artists and housewives who are no longer young, that the cosmos is a kind of large, white-tiled public urinal, ill-framed for the comfort of human beings, into which we have been thrust by some unknown Power, very likely as a bad celestial joke, with a probability that things will get worse, not better, at least for us personally; and the mystical view, that life is a kind of code language, by which monotony, anarchy, or atrocity, those all-too-familiar features of the human condition, are in truth the strange caresses of an all-knowing, all-loving Father.

I am aware that this last view makes most rational progressive people want to roll on the ground and scream with anger; yet it is the only one I know of that offers hope to people (like myself) who had long held the second view, and cannot believe that the availability of twenty thousand clinics, or the ownership of twenty thousand refrigerators, will actually change the human condition one iota.

page 106

What has this to do with the writings of Samuel Beckett? Well, for me at least, a great deal; for I had supposed that Beckett was merely an exponent of the non-progressive view, with whom I could mournfully sympathise. But recently, as I came down by plane from Palmerston North to Dunedin, and happened to swing over Wellington harbour, I could not look for more than a moment at the houses and hills which I had learnt for nearly twenty years to love and hate – because I was wholly immersed in this study of Samuel Beckett, following Jacobsen and Mueller along the jungle tracks of his blackhumour comedy and his profoundly religious uncertainties.

Sometimes a book about a writer can help one beyond all expectation. I have found this three times in my life – once, reading Chesterton on Browning: once reading Hugh B. Staples on the contemporary American poet Robert Lowell: and now again, reading Jacobsen and Mueller on Beckett. The commentators in each case were moved by intelligent, intuitive love. I hope some other readers will wish to share this experience with me.

1966 (398)