On Saturday afternoon, while Joe Biden was reaching the tormented end of his losing struggle with old age, I happened to be in Galway at Garry Hynes’s brilliantly bleak production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Aaron Monaghan speaks the opening line in a high-pitched monotone: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” Later, Rory Nolan’s Hamm utters an anguished “What’s happening, what’s happening?” and Monaghan replies: “Something is taking its course.”

It was indeed. What was taking its course was not just the Beckettian political drama of Biden’s futile struggle against inevitability (”you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”). It was time itself – time that ravages the body and dims the mind. Biden, and for too long his party, had been trying to make it stop, to subdue it by sheer force of will. He couldn’t go on, but in what he likes to think of as his Irish cussedness, he was going to go on, come hell or high Trumpism.

Even on Friday night, when Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain called him to relay messages of support from progressive Democrats and urge him to “stay in”, the president had replied (according to the New York Times), “That’s what I’m going to do.” Staying in, keeping going, is what Biden does. He endures through trials and tribulations, putting one foot in front of the other as he moves through this valley of tears.

He persevered through the death in a car crash of his........

© The Irish Times