From Andy Wimbush's 'The wisdom of Surrender':

The mystic paradox is pithily expressed in a maxim of the French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort, translated and versified by Beckett:

Hope is a knave befools us evermore
Which till I lost no happiness was mine.
I strike from hell’s to grave on heaven’s door
All hope abandon ye who enter in.

Beckett would often inscribe the maxim in copies of his play Endgame (1957) for his friends. Chamfort’s words, Beckett said, were the perfect rejoinder to all those readers and audiences who had, erroneously, found ‘affirmations of expressions of hope’ in his work. It is worth noting, however, that hope is the only casualty of Chamfort’s erasure and re-engraving. Happiness and even heaven are, remarkably, left intact. Chamfort’s point was merely that, in order to reach happiness or heaven, we must abandon hope for them through resignation and giving up. Or put another way, resignation of hope is the only happiness and heaven we are likely to attain.

Beckett’s own embrace of such an attitude can be seen in a beautiful letter he wrote in 1968 to Barbara Bray, a BBC producer he met while working on his radio plays who became a close confidante and companion. Bray’s husband had died in an accident and she had written to Beckett to share the news. He replied:

Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing.

After some careful disclaimers about his lack of useful wisdom, Beckett makes the astonishing suggestion that Bray should move towards ‘the heart of the gales of grief’, since it is there that these gales have ‘already … blown themselves out’. His description suggests a place of stillness and peace in the midst of suffering, perhaps like the eye of a hurricane. Beckett’s solution is paradoxically both an escape – as suggested by the word ‘fly’ – and also a courageous refusal to turn away from pain. He suggests that the movement out of pain is one that flies right into it, that embraces it whole-heartedly, that resigns itself and surrenders to it. Salvation is found, oddly enough, in a place of weakness, humility and lowliness, right in the midst of suffering. This is Beckett’s mystic paradox.

And so, Vladimir, interminably waiting for Mr Godot, needn’t have weighed the odds of salvation quite so anxiously. For the quietist, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, weal and woe, suffering and its end, are not distant poles, but perhaps two sides of the same coin. As Thomas à Kempis put it, in that phrase that Beckett confessed was made for him: ‘he that can well suffer shall find the most peace’.