OF GRAVE CONCERN
“It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them." Has there ever, in English, been a sentence as dreadfully elegant as this? It’s like six small stories, all miserable, smashed into one another. It’s by Samuel Beckett, from a short story called First Love. The narrator, an unstable young man, walks through the cemetery where his father has just been buried, eating bananas and looking down on the dead.
The story conjures Pere Lachaise, the sprawling nineteenth-century Parisian cemetery. It’s a place Beckett, who spent his adult life in the city, knew. And it’s where he’s buried, alongside his wife, in a low tomb topped with a suitably austere slab of black granite.
The cemetery is immense, over 100 acres, and its oldest parts are laid out in a web of curving stone paths that, gently, rise and fall and turn in upon themselves. I visited on a summer afternoon when the air was heavy and still, and there were few other tourists. I ignored the maps highlighting major attractions, including the graves of anti-austerity icons Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Instead I wandered, following the footpaths so far inside I didn’t know my way out, and didn’t care. The cemetery’s turning walkways hold what lies just ahead tantalizingly out of sight and pull one forward, as if one is moving toward something, while one may very well merely be walking in circles. It’s a notion – both funny and sad – Beckett would have approved of.