The title is from . . .

https://booksonthewall.com/blog/samuel-beckett-quote-fail-better/ .

This post was suggested by yesterday's Feast of St. Thomas Becket —

A Beckett-related flashback linked to here yesterday —

Rosalind Krauss in 1978 —

"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity." 

"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship

Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —

"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."

A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
 

COIN
 

RING

"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an 
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
 

KEY

"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A₈," in 
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference 
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
 

For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —