8 September 1934. What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape... Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever... Ruysdael’s Entrance to the Forest—there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make.
16 September 1934. I do not see any possibility of relationship, friendly or unfriendly, with the unintelligible, and what I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been false for him, because he had the sense of incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape but even with life of his own order, even with the life—one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate, not the Cézanne chauve but with the big hat—operative in himself.
—Beckett, letters to Thomas McGreevy
