On the Very Idea of Endings
Marianne Janack
1. Some endings are final: semesters,seasons, years, lives. At the end of a year the same line––the same final line––returns to me, from James Joyce, The Dubliners. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." Maybe it’s the satisfying alliteration, maybe it’s the invocation of the ultimate finality, death, maybe it’s just one of those thing that keeps coming back.
2. Some endings are frustrating: the end of the life of a washing machine; the end of the road; the end of Infinite Jest: “And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”
3. Some endings suggest other beginnings:
“Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.” Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
“That is how it works, Dizzy. But I know I still have plenty of time.” Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
“It is the unknown, and there is no way of stopping it. It waits, unseen, and she will meet it and it will meet her. There is no way of knowing what it will be. It does not know itself. But it will come into being. A child calls her from downstairs. The doorbell rings. The telephone also rings. She hears her house living. She rises.” Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground.
“Outside awaited other dreams.” Jorge Luis Borges, August 25, 1983.
“Sooner or later, when everything is said and done, all of it will wind up in the trash. If someday somebody takes up that trash once again and from it fabricates a few new sheets of paper, I trust that the next time around said paper will be used for something less ambiguous, less falsely magnanimous, less futile.” Augusto Monterroso, The Rest is Silence
But now the time has come to go away. I go to die, and you to live; but which of us goes to the better lot, is known to none but the gods.” Plato, The Apology
4. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are both frightening and enchantingly desirable,” thinks one character in A. S. Byatt,’s book Possession. And yet, endings might only appear in retrospect—they do not always announce themselves, and we cannot plan for them. Life has a special and inevitable ability to surprise you..
5. Time moves on; places change, things become other things; a story––our own, even––takes on a new meaning.
6. But we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
7. The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
8. But the effect of one’s being on those around her is incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
9. The end of any tale is arbitrarily determined. As I now end this one, somebody may say: how on earth do you know all these things about all these people? Well, where does one person end and another person begin?
10. Where does one story end and another begin?
(Paragraphs 6-9 include lines written by these authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, George Eliot, Iris Murdoch)