“Samuel Beckett tormented his interpreters with a story he told one time, supposedly to help them understand Waiting for Godot.579 He used to read, he said, a lot of Augustine in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and recalled one passage in particular: “Do not despair,” he remembered Augustine saying, “one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” Thinking of Vladimir and Estragon as the two thieves crucified with Jesus is intriguing, to say the least, and it is won- derfully Beckett-like that the particular passage cannot be found any- where in the surviving writings of Augustine or anywhere in the pages of Patrologia Latina, for all that the language and tenor are quite perfectly Augustinian. Did Beckett make up the quotation? Is he the most modern of pseudo-Augustines?”
