The Unnamable's gentle rhyme mocks the presumed ‘natural association’ between time and space. He continues: ‘as if it [space] were not bunged up on all sides, a few inches away, after all that's something, a few inches to be thankful for, it gives one air, room for the tongue to loll, to have lolled, to loll on’ (TN 390). Restricted space gives way to time; from an infinite form, to its present perfect, to the continuity of the phrasal verb, each ‘loll’ of the tongue complicating a simple correspondence between space, time and language. Yet the image of one inches before a wall imagining the nature of space beyond triggers the familiar paradox of Zeno's progression by halves, or the sorites problem of Endgame, where an infinity of space plunges into an infinite regress between the subject and a limit, as the Unnamable speculates:

The ‘natural association’ of linear time with linear space is, in Beckett's texts, constantly stymied by paradoxical intuitions of correlative infinites of space and time. And if time is ‘immaterial’, lacking substance, it is not ‘immaterial’, of no concern, for time may be accordingly material (substantial, of concern): ‘time is not one thing, I another’.