Source: Mark O’Connell in Slate Magazine, January 28
Stanislas Wawrinka’s defeat of Rafael Nadal in the final of the Australian Open last weekend was a milestone not just in the career of a 28-year-old Swiss tennis player but also in the posthumous life of one of the 20th century’s most unswervingly pessimistic writers.
This is the first time a Grand Slam title has ever been won by a player with a Samuel Beckett (pictured here) quotation tattooed on his body (barring some unexpected revelation that, say, Ivan Lendl got himself a Waiting for Godot–themed tramp stamp before beating John McEnroe in the 1984 French Open final). The words in question, inked in elaborately curlicued script up the length of Wawrinka’s inner left forearm, are these:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Are we not all, one way or another, eternal Sisyphean emulators? As Søren Kierkegaard saw the effort pertaining to anything a person loves too much hoping to ‘fail better’ next time around: “It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply indicates that they have no value.
Therefore, one should stay within one’s means in the use of the word “love.” And that was said before the Hollande affair.