Vogel: I might ask, is our desire for the end of the pandemic a desire to reestablish not just our day-to-day routines but also to return to all the distraction and noise that allow us not to think about the meaning of life? This is not to say that the pandemic is a good thing, but it’s an opportunity to ask, what if the thing you’re waiting for never arrives? What if instead of waiting, you act or think differently instead of trying to go back to the way things were?Īrthur C. Is there any wisdom or guidance you might extract from the play to help us cope with the remainder of our waiting? Pinsker: We’ve been waiting for the pandemic to be over for a year and a half now, but there still isn’t a clear end in sight. I think that’s what a lot of his work asks us to do. So instead of creating more words to fill the space, Beckett would greet you with silence, and you would have to sit with the uneasiness of not having an answer. Vogel: It’s a kind of refusal to retreat into the noise and distractions of everyday life that allow us to not think about the senselessness of the world and the inevitability of death that the pandemic forces into our consciousness every day. Pinsker: And how would you interpret that silence? If we asked him for advice, he would have probably responded with silence, but that silence itself would be his answer. Vogel: Beckett was notoriously evasive, so he would probably not want to make a kind of one-to-one connection between his plays and the pandemic. Pinsker: So do you think Beckett would regard the pandemic as an unfortunate but useful occasion to pause and reflect on how we want to spend our lives? And that’s part of what Beckett is after: How do we fill our time in order to avoid sitting with ourselves and confronting our existence? During the pandemic, we’ve lost many of our routines, our daily rhythms, and without the scaffolding that those things provide, we’re often forced to confront our existence itself-the fleetingness of time and our mortality. Beckett never says who or what Godot is or represents, and in some sense, he’s not really concerned with that as much as he is with the fact of waiting itself. Shane Vogel: The characters are almost pitiable in their effort to create some kind of routine or rhythm to occupy themselves and avoid thinking about the absurdity of their situation. Joe Pinsker: What do you see as the main messages of Waiting for Godot, and how do they apply to the experience of living through a pandemic? The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity. Given that many of us have spent the pandemic feeling similarly thwarted, I spoke with Vogel about what lessons the play might hold for this moment of drawn-out waiting. The supposed resolution to all this nonsense-the mysterious Godot- never actually arrives. And then they repeat this all again in Act II.”Īt one point, Estragon remarks, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” “This is a pretty good summary of the play itself,” Vogel said. “They eat carrots, they comfort each other, they suffer, they grieve, they lose sense of what day it is, they engage with passersby, they do yoga. “While they wait, they bicker, they banter, they amuse themselves,” Shane Vogel, a professor at Yale who specializes in theater and performance, explained to me. On a literal level, it is about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting on a country road for another man named Godot. The play is hard to summarize in a way that makes it sound coherent, probably because it isn’t. Postwar avant-garde theater is not the first place most people will turn to for wisdom in this time of uncertainty and impatience, but perhaps something like solace can be found in a classic work of literature about waiting, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Sure, some important milestones are ahead- vaccine authorization for young kids, a sustained nationwide lifting of restrictions, the expansion of vaccine access around the globe-but we are now in a fuzzier state of biding our time, one that lacks a clear endpoint. and the U.K., haven’t reached a vaccination level that has stifled transmission of the coronavirus. Many countries don’t have the doses that their residents need, and even the nations with wide availability, such as the U.S. But the vaccines arrived, and the pandemic is still very much here. During the first year of the pandemic, we at least had something to wait for: Effective vaccines were the gift that would theoretically deliver us back to normalcy.
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