Gnome

To avoid repetition and expound on the same rough idea that I shared in class… and more honestly, to save myself from reliving ‘Not I’ too many more times, I have decided to recognize another, shorter, funnier, more relatable Beckett piece for my inaugural Blog. I have chosen ‘Gnome’. I like this poem more and more with every read. Apparently Beckett was, like myself, suspicious (to put it politely) as to the notion of ‘higher learning’. I have even read elsewhere online that Beckett once presented to many prestigious French intellectuals a phony ‘learned paper’ by a Frenchmen that he had fabricated entirely: purely for the sport of mocking pedantry. (What a guy!)

I can’t help but to think about a wonderful quote that my buddy had pulled out earlier this day while we were conversing about our own collegiate suspicions. To quote Mr. Twain, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Wise words. And to quote Mr. Beckett, “that was a true saying.” Back to the poem, “Spend the years of learning squandering,” - check. Though I very seriously doubt that Beckett would give the advise of frittering away your days doing nothing. To some, in this 21^st century of ours, this line could be severely misconstrued, possibly as: ‘Spend the years of learning… in a dark room playing Call of Duty’. This is not the type of squandering that I imagine was meant in the poem. It's back to the point Mr. Twain made: school is not the only place to enhance your education. It’s the whole street/book smart binary. Higher learning, which translates almost exclusively as ‘University’, is the time in many-a lives that exposes the young to a world out from under the protective wings of parental control. It is consequently at this time that the young man or women should learn the ways of the world, and burying face to page is, as I believe Beckett to suggest, antagonistic to the perhaps more important experiential learning.

Another thing to cross my attention is the multiple ways of reading the poem due to the lack of punctuation; one of the benefits of minimalism. The line breaks indicate the end of a thought but if read continuously another fascinating reading (especially in the third and fourth lines) can be found. “Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.” In this the more obvious reading is that the world is literally turning on axis (politely) as heavenly bodies tend to do. When the line breaks are missing, however, it seems that the world – as in the people that occupy it – are the ones that are turning (as in straying) from the loutishness of learning. This suggests that people are straying from learning (but which kind?), becoming ignorant to some sort of education that one must have the ‘courage’ to wander through…