ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή [The way upward and the way downward is one and the same.] (Heraclitus, fragment 60 (Diels), epigraph to T. S. Eliot's ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets)

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

When I found myself, with students, reading some Beckett texts, I would take three lines, I would spend three hours on them, then I would give up because it would not have been possible, or honest, or even interesting to extract a few ‘significant’ lines from a Beckett text. The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem most ‘decomposed’, that's what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting’, that's the work, that's the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted […]. (Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution We Call Literature’)