Beckett's wonderfully snotty essay on habit and the "suffering of being" in Proust has this wonderful line: "Habit is the chain that ties the dog to its vomit" ( )

Not the first time I tried to read this book, but I this time I had more patience & familiarity with Beckett which helped me get a lot out of it. Beckett described it as full of "pretentious pseudo-philiosphical jargon", and whilst I see what he meant it is a profound meditation on memory, habit and art, as he reads Proust through his highly idiosyncratic lense. A book to think about for years yet. Although I'd never heard of the 3 artists he discusses in the conversations, they also treat well trodden themes of the exhausted subject of art and the inability to express - and are in places extremely funny. ( )