Beckett text and memories of reading

"It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft

and steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning. I hear the eagle-owl. What a terrible battle-cry ! Once I listened to it unmoved. My son is sleeping. Let him sleep. The night will come when he too, unable to sleep, will get up and go to his desk. I shall be forgotten."

----One of my favourite Beckett passages from Molloy. This is the beginning of the second part--the narrative of Moran. I still get the shivers while reading the telling last sentence of the paragraph. It's not 'I will be forgotten' but 'I shall be forgotten'. How haunted the mortal human subject is by the complete oblivion that awaits him or her in the so-called after-life.

It's more of an after-time than after-life. Life perishes and time alone remains. Perhaps a blurry web of memory lingers in that after-time until those who remember us are gone for good and we are completely forgotten. Against the timeless scale of time, even trans-generational memory shuts down after two or three generations.

I remember the old soiled copy of Molloy in the Presidency College Library in 2004. When I borrowed it, I was its first borrower since the 1960s. That was the beginning of my years with Sam, slowly going through every sentence of a sparklingly dense prose that changed both the joys and the sorrows of my life.

Sam, I know 'I shall be forgotten' but you shall never be...