But despite the benefits of Beckett’s attitude, he’s not quite an exemplar of healthful aging: His “lifestyle” was that of a Parisian Bohemian, and he seemed unconcerned about the harmful physical effects of smoking and drinking. After an illness in 1969, he writes, “I am almost quite well again. I have not smoked for nearly a year, but hope to light up again soon. Whiskey too was out for a time but has now resumed its kind offices.” This all may sound deliberately reckless and irresponsible in 2016, but in the final analysis, Beckett lived until he was 83 and was active and productive late into life. His letters are a reminder to avoid seeking out a single cookie-cutter approach to living a long and active life, since everyone must draft their own map through trial and error.

Letters also give readers glimpses into the little everyday indignities and mishaps that anyone over 60 is familiar with. It’s comforting, at times humorous, and even liberating to read about the kind of falls and mishaps that are commonly left out of the biographies of Nobel Prize winners. “Might have damaged myself beyond repair last night in the bathroom,” Beckett writes at the age of 69 to his life-long mistress Barbara Bray in 1975. “Had got out of the bath & was drying myself with my back to it when my feet slipped & I fell in backward.” Two years later he writes, “I slipped & fell in the street yesterday, but could pick myself up & go on cursing God & man.” This elliptical sentence exemplifies what is great about Beckett’s letters, and about his approach to growing old. He falls down—he of course gets up. But then, in a perfect Beckettian flourish, he curses both God and man, though one can almost hear the wink-and-nod of Irish sarcasm, tossed in for the benefit of his reader.

The onset of middle age, and beyond, often prompts the second-guessing of old decisions. Some feel guilty about relationships pursued (or not pursued), while others wish they had followed an early passion or artistic impulse. In three separate letters, Beckett discusses his remorse about not going to work for the Guinness beer company in Dublin just as his middle-class father had repeatedly suggested. It’s a detail that many unfulfilled workers should ponder: A life as a successful musician, or All-Pro quarterback, or even as a Nobel Prize-winning writer for that matter, does not exempt one from the pangs of occupational regret. You can be brilliant; you can write Waiting for Godot, you can have an apartment in Paris and a house in the French countryside, and still wonder if you’d be happier being a 9-to-5 drone in a Dublin office cubicle.

In 1988 Beckett’s life took its most severe turn when he entered a nursing home in Paris. He understood this was his final home. He writes, “Still here with the old crocks [Beckett’s slang for old people], it sometimes feels for keeps.” A year later, during his final year, his letters become shorter, terser, more like emails than epistles. In one of the more touching lines, he ends a letter to his friend Rick Cluchey by writing: “Silence is my cloister.” A long life, by its very nature, ensures that one will witness the death of close of friends, potentially even a spouse, and many others who have formed one’s community. And when one is removed to a nursing home, social isolation becomes a reality—and there is no roadmap for such challenges. But perhaps Beckett did understand the nursing-home experience as something of a monastery-like place of contemplation, a place where loneliness and isolation could, perhaps, be spiritual fodder for personal redemption.