The day after the world changed, my friend and I are on a crowded tube, having just seen a showing of Beckett’s Endgame in London’s Barbican, and then listened to the producers and director speak of his integrity, to a cinema that was not full.

“Never seen anything like that!/What? A sail? A fin? Smoke?/The light is sunk./Pah! We all knew that./There was a bit left./The base./Yes./And now?/All gone.”

An eighteen-month-old boy sits in his buggy in the rattling compartment. Square-faced, seraphic, a white woollen hat circles his tender skin, the colour of pages from an old paperback. His dark eyes contemplate us serenely, taking us in, reading our souls. He does not blink once. I mug and jig around to see his reaction; a steady accepting gaze is my only reward. He observes each of us, owl-like, in turn.

His young mother, standing behind him, in a maroon and cream chador, plastic shopping bags hanging from the buggy’s handles, shyly observes us with interest, but looks down quickly every time I try to catch her eye to communicate my delight at her son’s demeanour. We are filled with joy at his seriousness, his strength, his peace. When the train stops at our station, we wave goodbye. His lips curl a millimetre, in the ghost of a faintly amused smile, an infant Gioconda, and his mother fusses with his jacket to hide her pleasure. His eyes remain locked on our laughing faces, as the doors slide shut.

“Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!/That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”

The director talks, after the screening, of the characters in the play: in his mind, it’s as if they are arguing fussily about cutlery placements, while dining on the edge of an abyss. Beckett stares out our annihilation, in words written in a war called Cold.

Despair, stereotypies outcrazying mad rats in a cage, body obsession, pain-mismanagement, time, tics, catheters,, unanswered prayers, combination-locks on larders, disjointed memories, blindness. Piss. Human litter-trays full of unreplenished sand. A telescope. A distant bell. A biscuit to gnaw on. Cruelty, delivered with absent-minded indifference. Words of love uttered with the same grey disdain. Generation after generation repeating rituals of decay, scratching the same existential itch. Two nonagenarian actors squatting in metal dustbins in the corner, life etched deeply into their sagging leather faces, eyes bright and lost. Surviving. Dying. Unable to reach each other to kiss. A last request: a scratch in the back.

“If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with. I’ll have called my father and I’ll have called my… my son. And even twice, or three times, in case they shouldn’t have heard me, the first time, or the second.”

We create our own reality, and we insulate ourselves from the world outside, for it is too painful. But we have learned something about ourselves. Something indestructible, a diamond in the cesspit. We know, now, that when we face destruction and hate, we call out in love. Thousands of words and sighs and tears of love, filling the airwaves across the world, before the silence and the dust.

“You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little... you begin to grieve. All those I might have helped. Helped! Saved. Saved! The place was crawling with them!”

The little Muslim boy may grow up to find his comfort in this life, to be satisfied with the mundane pleasures of bread and olives, swans and music, sea and sand, football and hugs, children and trees, kind words of love, the friendship of women and men, a worthy creed to live, forgive, and be forgiven by. Judging by his deep pools of eyes, he has been loved every day of his life, his world is an open adventure, unscripted with fear. Perhaps he’s noticing the way his parents have shifted their balance that day, on the backfoot, wary of what’s coming their way. Perhaps he will escape the ravages of revenge and fear; perhaps he will remain at peace, although wise beyond his years.

If not, if he grows up to be wounded enough to fear his ordinariness, his humanity, the dull but nourishing texture of a life less glorious than the fables, the tide of raw emotion and empathy that flows through us all like a current, day in, day out, he will escape to a loftier, Olympian plane, where he can leave behind the pettiness of his life, bargain it away for certain eternal glory. He may find himself groomed, made feel special, made feel wanted and loved by God or Allah, by a group of men who fear women and their scolding, women who do not believe the necessity for men to find a cause in order to feel their life has meaning, who dismiss a mother’s passion to preserve life as trivial, compared to the glorious will of their masculine god.

He will convince himself that his mortal life means nothing – not that it felt like much in the first place – but at least, this way, he can escape the torment of fallibility, the muckiness and misery of ordinary human affairs, the resounding injustice of poverty and oppression and war. His story can become a narrative that does not end with his death. If his parents nurse grievances against the world, he will learn to mirror them, his private pain will echo the privations and insults to the pride of his people, the collective family whose ways are threatened, whose culture is mocked and feared. He will be as ripe a berry for the picking by his dark princes, as all unloved and frightened boys can be.

We do not need to think only of deserts and calls-to-prayer; think shabby hacienda-style farmhouses and tractors and pigshit and mossy concrete sheds, Semtex lying potent under corrugated rust, rain-soaked balaclavas and graffiti.

A cause intensifies suffering, but also transforms it into something more ruthless, less fallible; a salve to existential dread. The fury of the righteous offers illusions of potency, revenge for every crushing reminder of their/our impotence. Sacrifice stinks of corrupt power, more offensively than human flesh compressed under concrete and rubble for months. Sometimes, though, people can feel it is their only weapon left.

A man starves in a shit-covered cell, ignores his women’s pleas for gentleness, and dies for his motherland. More men follow him to add their names to the martyrs’ roll. For what? For land, for Rome, for the boglands, for Kathleen Ní Houlihán, for all those who have suffered before him, gave their lives for the cause. Against what? Against a culture and a power that does not understand him, that does not respect him or his land, that impoverishes him and his people, that does not listen. Listen to me. To us. You are not listening.

A man knifes a stewardess and steers a huge craft, screaming, straight into a glass and concrete populated cliff. For what? For land, to avenge every holy territory that has been plundered for oil, invaded for war, every mosque that has been placed under a hostile flag, every city that has been divided. Against what? Cultural imperialism disguised as capitalism, as the global economy. Progress, the profit motive, insulting the poor who yearn for a simpler answer, an age of tradition, rigid sex roles, and the secure straitjacket of ritual and dogma. Who demand that they be respected, the wrongs be righted, and that they be listened to. Listen to me. To us. You are not listening.

America has discovered castration anxiety too late; the twin towers of symbolic and financial world domination have been demolished, have proved to be as soft and as vulnerable as a couple of penises. Knives and revenge were all it took. This war is not about faith, or religion; it is about the wounds of tribes festering, and not being healed. It is about not listening to each other, ignoring each other’s values, and not even understanding them. It is about projecting evil on to each other. It is a polarity. To break the vicious cycle, someone – anyone – has to step out of the projection, and care enough to listen, not to accuse; to understand, not to destroy.

“Put me in my coffin/There are no more coffins.”

Quotes from Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957)