Abstract
Be careful how you talk about God. He’s the only God we have. If you let him go he won’t come back. He won’t even look back over his shoulder. And then what will you do? You know what it’ll be like, such a vacuum? It’ll be like England playing Brazil at Wembley and not a soul in the stadium. Can you imagine? Playing both halves to a totally empty house. The game of the century. Absolute silence. Not a soul watching. Absolute silence. Apart from the referee’s whistle and a fair bit of fucking and blinding. If you turn away from God it means that the great and noble game of soccer will fall into permanent oblivion. No score for extra time after extra time after extra time, no score for time everlasting, for time without end. Absence. Stalemate. Paralysis. A world without a winner. (AA 39–41)
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Notes and References
Pinter, cited in Ronald Knowles, ‘Harold Pinter, Citizen’, The Pinter Review 3 (1989) p. 25.
Pinter, cited in Matt Wolf, ‘Happy 60th Birthday, Harold Pinter’, The Miami Herald, 7 October 1990, p. 71.
Louis Marks, ‘Producing Pinter’, in Pinter at Sixty, edited by Katherine H. Burkham and John L. Kundert-Gibbs (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1993) p. 22.
Ibid.
Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, Collected Poems, 1934–1953 (London, 1988) p. 148.
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (London, 1991) p. 53.
Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a ChineseLaundry (London, 1987) p. 241.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ladies’, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London, 1941) p. 213.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London, 1975) p. 13.
Franz Kafka, The Trial (Harmondsworth, 1953) p. 168. This sentence — a translation of Es ist das eine Stellung, die sich immer vererbt — appears in the earlier English editions of the novel, but has been truncated in the ‘definitive’ edition to ‘It’s a hereditary post’ (T 169).
Ivor H. Evans, ed., Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London, 1981) p. 257.
Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (London, 1990) p. 275.
Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allen Wolfe, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1991) p. 129.
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1982) p. 142.
Ibid., p. 132.
Ibid., p. 134.
R.W. Holder, The Faber Dictionary of Euphemisms (London, 1989) p. 214.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Harlow, Essex, 1983) p. 20.
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© 1999 Raymond Armstrong
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Armstrong, R. (1999). The Final Blasphemy: Moonlight . In: Kafka and Pinter Shadow-Boxing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376182_4
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