Question

my urge to fail and fail again by david duchovny 1 my daughter, west, just texted me and asked what i thought about her getting a tattoo—tasteful and small, monochrome, . . . —of a samuel beckett epigram from worstward ho: “fail again. fail better.” this brings me to tears. that she would ask—she’s 21; she can do as she pleases, but she also knows that i know she knows the quote through me. it’s between us. she knows i wrote my senior thesis at princeton 1,000 years ago on beckett’s novels. . . . 2 my kid does know that i’m half in love with failure, a kind of connoisseur¹ of failure, and that even at a young age that must have drawn me to beckett, as it later drew me to acting, and writing, and music—endeavors in which perfection is an impossible target. i’ve always loved the mistakes. the energy created by hamartia, the near miss. the crackling freedom and electricity when you forget your lines. to create is to fail. and to fail is to fall. and to fall is to be human. when we fall, we reach out our hands to all of humanity. . . . 3 i write for my daughter and my son because i have this belief/fantasy that when i am gone, if my kids could pulp my novels, make a kind of mulch of them—much as i imagine researchers do to spin out the dna of pulverized ancient dinosaur fossils—they could get my dna. from the pulpy mulch. that my kids, if they ran that book dna in the lab, could see me there clearly: the footprint, the fingerprint, dad/david. the mysterious, spiraled math of my heart and soul that hid part of itself from the light and casually spoken words. and maybe this will free them of something. these books are my way of talking once i’m dead, of speaking truth to the future. 4 thinking of my kids and what is nameable and unnameable between the generations makes me think of my parents williams, jadon last saved: 10:27 am the greek root gram means “something written.” based on this information, what is the meaning of epigram as it is used in paragraph 1? an article a description a witty saying a long quotation

Explanation:

The Greek root "gram" means "something written". An epigram is a short, witty, and often philosophical saying. In paragraph 1, the epigram from Samuel Beckett is a short, meaningful saying ("Fail again. Fail better."), so it matches "a witty saying". An article is longer and more detailed, a description focuses on explaining details (not a short saying), and a long quotation would be much longer, so those are incorrect.

Answer:

C. a witty saying