On the World

"The crisis started with the end of the seventeenth century, after Galileo. The eighteenth century has been called the century of reason, le siècle de la raison. I've never understood that: they're all mad, ils sont tous fous, il déraisonnent! They give reason a responsibility which it simply can't bear, it's too weak. The Encyclopedists wanted to know everything . . . But that direct relation between the self and - as the Italians say - lo scibile, the knowable, was already broken. Leonardo da Vinci still had everything in his head, still knew everything. But now! Now it's no longer possible to know everything, the tie between the self and things no longer exists . . . One must make a world of one's own in order to satisfy one's need to know, to understand, one's need for order. There, for me, lies the value of the theatre. One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard . . . Yes, even the game of chess is still too complex"

--Samuel Beckett