If ideas are more powerful than people, then words are the weapons with which idealists wage war. But what of the silent majority that suffer without cause? With no banner to fly or flag to wave, their passion turns inward, eating away at the soul like a cancer.

On this day in 1957, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame was first performed in London, in French, for the first time. After his success with Waiting for Godot a few years earlier, Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk a theater on a play that featured one character who could’nt stand, one who couldn’t sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans. He had written the play in French and wanted a French premiere, but when the Royal Court Theatre offered their space, Beckett agreed to cross the channel and perform the play in England.

Endgame was met with poor reviews. Beckett was unhappy with the production, and it is perhaps in the words of his character Hamm that we best get a glimpse into the "suffering without cause" of which I spoke earlier: for Hamm says "we ourselves . . . at certain moments . . .(Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!"

In one phrase, there is such hope and such despair. The perfect marriage of reality interjecting itself into the absurd. And on days like there, I find myself sharing in the absurdity of believing that any words will truly change the course of the future. Will any of it have meaning? Will it Jay-Z? Will it Pope Benedict. Will it Barack Obama?

I turn from Beckett to an unknown poet, a friend of mine, who once wrote that "the paths we take are half our own / And half the universe in turn."

If that is the case, then much is left in between. Like dogs, the poets, the priests, and the politicians can all tear at the corpse that is culture and watch it bleed out the words its bloated body can no longer hold. Let’s take them into our collective teeth, chew them up, and crap them out as something better say the masses. So here’s to the poets, the priests, and the politicians who sling that crap and try to make it stick. To make a difference.

Here’s hoping someone can do something more with words than this old man can.