More waxings on last pages
Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2004 @ 01:05 PM
There is a reason we keep reading books, I think, and that is for the last few pages--when hundreds of events become one, single moment. No matter what the moment is, it seems important. Perhaps it is because a moment written on the last page--a moment like all other moments--is more complex than the ones before it as past accumulates to present. The last moment in a book is simply--inevitably--the most complex, as no other moments follow it.
Granted, it is most likely a well-written moment (and probably a decently-written book). We must take into consideration the fact that the book is most likely a published one, most likely one we have heard a lot about, one that someone has recommended. And so this moment, whether it was the one we anticipated or not, is something predisposed and effective, or else the editor would have changed it. Or, if it isn't effective (despite the fact that we anticipated it all along) the book doesn't ring as true. We dub it "bad"; the accumulation of events fills something less than the two cups of complexity or the gallon of culmination, and we're still thirsty and unsatisified.
And afterward, when you roll it over in your mind again and again, sipping or gulping the moment down without regret, you get closer and closer to the last trickling drop that spreads across the sides of the glass, spreads too thin to make it to your lips. You eventually run out of whatever drink and realization that came with the last page, until it doesn't make sense anymore. Until all the moments mean nothing, until they simply become a sequence of events, a timeline that can't surpass present day, a thousand pages reshelved and forgotten, a million words that form sentences and plot, but not the idea which you tasted on the last page. You can't tear it out for someone when you recommend the book. You can't see if the same revelation is in every copy. You can't check the last few sentences a few weeks later and expect to find something lingering there.
It is something entirely ephemeral, fleeting, something too big or too miniscule to wrap your mind's fingers around. Who knows if it is the same abstraction in every book, woven into that last magical page. Who knows if it will still be there in ten or twenty years, when you open your sixteen-hundredth book, when you close it one day later. Who knows what all these pages, what our eyes' decreasing twentieths amount to, what the sheer volume of work and time means. Who knows when the last silent moment and meditation is lost, like the milliseconds between thought and speech.
The last page, the last sentence, will always be the hardest to write.
[P.S. Capitalism at its best.]
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
If you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to future updates via this RSS file.
so yeah. i guess this means you didn't forget th eurl to your own website. at any rate, when you do write, its always awesome. i had a good time saturday. it made me feel like i was actually being a teenager for once, instead of some geezer in a 16 year-olds body. i finally have some free time, so gimme a call when the same is true for you. ta.
- matthew -
10 Mar 2004, 11:46 PM.
aw naw dawg, me and da february archive, we're jus chillin'.
we're inviting november and december over later for some tea and crumpets.
11 Mar 2004, 8:51 AM.