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HAMM: (Modestly.)Oh not very far, you know, not very far but nevertheless, better than nothing.

CLOV: Better than nothing! Is it possible?

(Samuel Beckett : Endgame)

‘Better than nothing’ is not the lazy, resigned shrug lacking in ambition that it might seem to be at first sight. For those extremists who need a surfeit of everything, it is not the polar opposite of the unattainable ‘better than anything’ (a ‘want for nothing’). It is more probably to be found about half way along that particular continuum: since the quantity of all those things that are worse than nothing may, perhaps, equal all those things that are better than nothing.

For those nihilists who are excessively fond of nothing at all – who, quite simply, like nothing better – and who ask how something could possibly ever be better than nothing, the reply must be that, whilst everything comes from something, meaning and significance arise where there was none before even in the mind of its originator: inspiration is a spark out of nothing (or not much more than nothing). It is a qualitative something from nothing. And some of the time, it is better than nothing.