Of endings.

From Andrew Holleran's 1983 novel _Nights in Aruba_, from its concluding pages ... our rather listless hero is looking for conclusion if not closure.

I no longer believed when I awoke in the morning that I could, by lying still in my dark room, balance past, present, and future, or figure everything out. I was certain that even death would provide no illumination — that we died ignorant, confused, like novelists who cannot bring an aesthetic shape to their material.
[...]
As I sat there in my silent room I saw these memories would be with me forever, that wherever they were, I was: some part of me. But the life I must begin was my own — a separate person's. This was difficult. For I realized that so much memory and desire swirl about in the hearts of men on this planet that, just as we can look at Neptune and say it is covered with liquid nitrogen, or Venus and see a mantle of hydrochloric acid, so it seemed to me that were one to look at Earth from afar one would say it is covered completely in Ignorance.

And the reader is thus left to ponder. And perhaps conclude that a closer view, a view perhaps more down to earth, is possible and through which one appreciates that allegorical figure of Ignorance as the product of a novelist certainly not confused nor ignorant. Our author is in no need of illumination to provide the ending a novel. He knows how to insert a self-destructing allegory.

And so for day 527
23.05.2008