Just revisited a letter sent by Samuel Beckett to Morris Sinclair, dated 4 March 1934. The young writer greets the inevitable turning of the season with great anticipation:

“The strange, gentle pleasures that I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me. I have positively never watched it coming with so much impatience and so much relief. And I think of it as a victory over darkness, nightmares, swears, panic and madness, and of the crocuses and daffodils as the promise of a life at least bearable, once enjoyed but in a past so remote that all trace, even remembrance of it, had been almost lost.”

Excerpted from Cambridge University Press’ The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940.