Finishing things (11.23.22)

Not random thinking, but not formal thinking, either. This morning I finished reading Lydia Davis's Essays One, a volume of 30+ pieces of writing over 40 years, gathered into a single volume. Fell asleep last night with barely 15 pages left to read; fell asleep with the pleasurable anticipation that I'd finish reading this 500 page book in the morning. And so I have.

Coming through. It's how I feel when finishing any book or project or piece of writing. The feeling of having come through something, a task, a commitment, a construction in writing or reading. (For reading is or can by just as constructed as writing; you build your way through a novel or, in this case, a book of essays.)

Always, no matter what I am reading, I experience endings nostalgically, with a "looking back" over what I've just read (however long that reading took to come through) as I approach the last paragraph or line. There's nothing unique in that experience, of course. Looking back, summing up, is what endings are all about, and any writer worth her salt sees to it that the story or the poem or the play/act/scene comes to a satisfying end, meaning, a summation, a place where we can review what we've just experienced.

My mind resists the completion when I read a poem or a story. My eye slows across and down the page to "take in" every subject and predicate, phrase and clause, word, comma, semicolon, period. As I approach the end of a reading, everything about it becomes expensive: word, phrase, sentence.

Finishing a piece of reading, a whole piece, and closing the book, I experience a sense of forever, forever-ness. I mean, I shall never read this text for the first time again. When the book goes back onto the shelf from which it came, there is a finality to it, the book and its stories. Thus the nostalgia, and even some melancholy of finishing things.

Finishing a book, a poem, as a kind of death, a separation. 

But a read poem is never finished. I will read the poem again and discover something else, additional. Another poem, maybe, for the poem will be different then. I will be different. Knowing this, as I finish reading a poem through for the first time, I know that I will never have that experience again with this poem.

And that is something I have to give up, that newness. Thus the nostalgia, the melancholy.