"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead"

Beckett's words gesture toward the limitations and peculiar riches of human knowledge, shaped and bounded by language and memory. “All I know is what the words know” reveals an intimate dependency on language, not just as a medium for expressing thought, but as the very substance from which knowledge is constituted. There is an implicit humility here: our understanding of the world is not extrinsic, but always filtered, crafted, and perhaps confined by the words that we have inherited. These words carry meanings and histories beyond any individual, and so knowing is always a matter of engaging with what has already been spoken or written; the new, the originary experience, is always refracted by preexisting language.

The next phrase, “and dead things,” adds a haunting depth. The dead things evoke memory, history, tradition, and all that is lost but persists in some inert form, objects, ideas, or people that have gone but still exert influence. Beckett places “dead things” beside “words,” aligning both as repositories of meaning. Knowledge becomes, then, a collection of relics, a gathering of echoes, the accretion of what is over and what can be articulated.

Together, these form “a handsome little sum,” described by the architectural motif of “a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” This evokes a sense of order and structure; language imposes direction and coherence onto experience, much like music or narrative shapes time and emotion. Yet there is also irony and resignation: the “handsome little sum” is the totality of human knowledge, but it is little, circumscribed, its beauty emerging not from grandeur or originality but from the careful arrangement of remnants and silence into something intelligible and meaningful, even as it remains haunted by all it cannot say or recover.