Fail Better
"Fair Better": What It Means. Your Thoughts Wanted. Possibly the most famous passage in all of Beckett outside of Waiting for Godot is this snippet from Worstward Ho: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Let us note first off here that this quotation is often given in a truncated form, most typically "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." However, it is not clear that this ma kes self-contained syntactical sense without the two preceding sentences: "All of old. Nothing else ever." What the statement means, not even philosophically but at a basic syntactic and semantic level, is open to interpretation. The intuition, correctly, is that it is possible to restate these clipped propositions less ambiguously, less impressionistically, without loss of meaning. For example, Colin Greenlaw's "elaboration" reads as