First Love

"What mattered to me ... was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short."

Supineness of the mind. What a great picture of the mind idle, not thinking. Beckett wants to stop, as much as he can, thinking. Not only to dull his concept of the self, but even what is left over after the self has passed. He wants to lose his grip on the concept of the world.

Directly after this quote Beckett brings the story back to the physical. "But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection." Even in this age of reason mankind is inseparable from his physical form. The body must eat, must breath, must have erections, and so on. It is unstoppable, and this seems almost to undercut his prior point of dulling the self and the world.

He recounts or imagines an encounter in which he says, "It is painful to be no longer oneself, even more if possible than when one is." This is because if you know who you are it is much easier to know who you don't want to be.

The situation is cyclical. For, as he strives lazily to dull his sense of himself and the world, he puts himself in an even worse state of mind, because he doesn't know who not to be. This cyclical reasoning always always always throughout the story brings us back to the physical and the object of the story. Just as the narrator the image of his first love is brought back to that bench at evening.

Beckett works throughout the story to accommodate the mess of the physical and to prevent the organiztion of the metaphysical - love.