Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett, p.247-254

• A late evening in the future.
• On the table a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes.
• TAPE. ... Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the... [hesitates]... crest of the wave--or thereabouts.
• Extraordinary silence this evening, I strain my ears and do not hear a sound. Old Miss McGlome always sings at this hour. But not tonight.
• Just been listening to an old year, passages at random. I did not check in the book, but it must have been at least ten or twelve years ago. At the time I was still living on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street. Well out of that, Jesus yes! Hopeless business.
• These old P.M.s are gruesome, but I often find them-- [KRAPP switches off, broods, switches on] --a help before embarking on a new... [hesitates]... retrospect.
• Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations!
• Seventeen hundred hours, out of the proceeding eight thousand odd, consumed on licensed premises alone. More than 20%, say 40% of his waking life.
• Plans for a less... [hesitates]... engrossing sexual life.
• What remains of all that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform? No?
• KRAPP [reading from a dictionary]. State--or condition of being--or remaining--a widow--a widower.
• Whenever I looked in her direction she had her eyes on me. And yet when I was bold enough to speak to her--not having been introduced--she threatened to call a policeman. As if I had designs on her virtue!
• Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that... [hesitates]... for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely-- [KRAPP switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again]
• --my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
• [KRAPP switches off, winds tape back, switches on again.]
• I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-- [Pause.] --after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her.
• KRAPP. Just listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway. [Pause.] The eyes she had!
• Maybe he was right. [Broods. Realizes. Switches off. Consults envelope.] Pah! [Crumbles it and throws it away. Broods. Switches on.]
• [With relish.] Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million.
• Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas.
• Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes. [Pause.] Could I? [Pause.] And she? [Pause.] Pah!
• The last time wasn't so bad. How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
• Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. [Pause.] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells.
• Be again, be again. [Pause.] All the old misery. [Pause.] Once wasn't enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across her.
• [Long pause. He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front.]
• TAPE. --gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes.
• Here I end this reel. Box-- [Pause.] --three, spool-- [Pause.] --five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.
• [KRAPP motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.]