Samuel Beckett and climate change

Today was a cold one and so I stayed indoors all day reading Samuel Beckett, coming upon the sentence he'd written concerning climate change.

At the centre of this enclosure stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes.

(The sentence is from The Unnamable. The enclosure is, as I take it to mean, the earth.)

I read the sentence two or three times, laughing and then crying, crying and then laughing, neither outwardly or inwardly, but equally outwardly and inwardly. Beckett wrote the sentence in 1953, three years after I was born and ten years before the climate started to change under scientific and propagandistic observation. Beckett wrote the sentence, seeing what was coming. I know I shouldn't laugh  when I read the sentence about climate change.

Beckett shouldn't be funny, but he is, he's really funny. I know I shouldn't be laughing when I read him, knowing what I know, but I laugh anyway. I cry at my laughing, I'd forgotten how funny Beckett is, how the weather around me changes every time I read him. He's best read as a writer who knows he's hurting, who knows it's only human laughter that ever makes enough warmth that has a chance to save humans from being from themselves.

When I laugh while reading Beckett my laughter produces an average increase in global temperature of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees and, when I cry when reading him, my crying floods the easternmost and westernmost coasts.