Still Waiting for Godot

One of the legends surrounding Waiting For Godot (this year celebrating the 60th anniversary of its premiere) — and there are many, as is the case with all works of art that are mysterious and canonical — is that Beckett took his inspiration for the play from Caspar David Friedrich’s "Man and Woman Observing the Moon." The painting is quintessential Friedrich: a subject — in this case two — gazing solemnly out at the sublimity of Nature. The man and woman stand on a hill next to a craggy tree that is half-dead, uprooted, and leaning over a rock. The couple is wearing traditional German folk dress. They are motionless, transfixed by the sky, the moon, the ridge of pines in the distance. The man’s arms are down; perhaps his hands are clasped before him. The woman keeps one arm at her side and her right hand rests gently on the shoulder of the man. “If there is one word for the mood of Friedrich's pictures it is ‘longing’,” wrote the critic Robert Hughes, “the desire, never satisfied, to escape from the secular conditions of life into union with a distant nature, to be absorbed in it, to become one with the Great Other, whether that other is a mountain crag, an ancient but enduring tree, the calm of a horizontal sea, or the stillness of a cloud.”