Beginnings and Endings

It seems as good a time as any to remark upon the significance of beginnings and endings. Such thoughts have been in my mind since yesterday morning but I put them off in order to 'work'; needless to say, this attempt did not yield the desired fruit. I guess some things are not meant to be stifled.

Surprisingly, Cambridge has settled into a quiet that is rare in summer months. The university town is usually abuzz with ten different languages bargaining for food and asking for directions. In contrast, its streets (especially in the mornings) have been empty, and thus peaceful. It is as if the town is recovering from the hullabaloo of the year's activities and preparing for the next. No other place is so transient in its very nature.

On the subject of endings, I have encountered two others that are not my own. Both are the product of excellent penmanship and poignantly capture the evanescent effect of time. The first takes place twenty-six years after the main action of the story; the second, twenty. There is little need to divulge the endings (I encourage you to read them for yourselves). I will only say that both left me on the floor of my room (where I read) with eyes wet not for excess of emotion but for the recognition of one of the things that connects us all.

The day I left for Paris, I had the opportunity to give my first supervision. It was on Shakespeare's late plays, and the text at hand was The Winter's Tale. As I waited for the silence to be broken, one of my students commented on the extraction of Time in Act IV.1. We examined the purpose and noted how Shakespeare's treatment conspicuously subordinates something which is knowingly insurmountable. One could argue that incarnating Time makes it vulnerable, but this personfication only emphasises its intractability.

The irony is not lost on me, but it is also not as frustrating as I might have expected. Rather, Wharton's (Pulitzer Prize 1921) account of Newland Archer twenty-six years later and Cather's (Pulitzer Prize 1923) of James Burden twenty years later takes the events and emotions that were once so immediate and compelling and places them in a grander register: Time 'shall do / To th' freshest things now reigning, and make stale / The glistering of this present' (WT lns 13-14). It is not, however, that the events and emotions lose their gravity; rather what was once so particular and unique is now rendered universal. Both endings make those unfulfilled wishes/wants/desires/longings all the more acute, but also freezes them in an inaccessible past and distances us from them. Perhaps this is the veneer on photos - sepia, black and white; it reminds us that we look retrospectively.

What both endings have reminded me is that we all belong to a greater story, that we are at once significant and insignificant. What feels most acute now (be it of a happy or sad nature) will one day be set in perspective, especially when the next cycle begins. We are, as my mentor reminds me, self-referential beings: we think and feel that there is no one who understands or empathises; or, that our moment of 'glory' is incomparable. But this feeling neither exempts us from being intimiately tied to one another nor, on the flip side, excuses us from being reminded that we are, at the end of the day, also ordinary. Time reconciles the paradox of being entirely unique and entirely common; and we need to feel both to feel special yet connected.

Where does this leave me? The people I have met and the moments in which I have been inserted are irreplaceable. No one ever likes to say goodbye, and I less so. But I am also not sad because I feel as if another corner of my picture has been painted (my mentor likens lives to paintings). The colours behind this picture are vivid, and they register moments where I felt more and more comfortable 'stepping out of the boat'. They hint at the fullness of a year lived.

Posted on August 8, 2007 at 04:47AM