While rereading the superb Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, the autobiography by James Knowlson written with Beckett’s blessing, I came across this telling and amazing passage from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s first novel, published in 1932:

He lay lapped in a beatitude of indolence that was smoother than oil and softer than a pumpkin, dead to the dark pangs of the sons of Adam, asking nothing of the insubordinate mind. He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire…. If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and its discriminations and futile sallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off.

From Dream of Fair to Middling Women: A Novel by Samuel Beckett.

Beckett would revisit this quest for Nirvana-like nihilism of mind many times later, increasingly chopping language down to its barest nubbins.