“Towards the end of his life, Samuel Beckett, confronting the prospect of a major creative impasse, wrote to the theatre director George Tabori about the abiding illusion that had sustained him throughout his long career: “While still ‘young’ I began to seek consolation in the thought that then if ever, i.e. now, the true words at last, from the mind in ruins. To this illusion I continue to cling”. With typical economy, Beckett’s statement brings home some of the major themes of his post-war writing, his dream of stripping away the accoutrements of language, culture and personality – the “accidentals” of our existence – to see what remains. Yet beyond the strikingly Beckettian image of “the mind in ruins”, the statement is also sounding out the farrago of times and tenses that make up our minds on matters of remembrance – here, the way in which the future “then” of a young man anticipating how it will be shifts to the “now” of an old man remembering how it was. Finding the right form for expressing the tangled relations between memory, self and language was something that preoccupied Beckett throughout his writing life… It has become something of a critical commonplace to suggest that memory is another name for invention in Beckett’s work, a way of creating self-consoling stories to accompany us in the dark…” (Times of London)