Endings 3

 To round off this mini-anthology of endings (and the month of April), here is a miscellaneous collection with no obvious linking features...

First, an ending I think one of the most beautiful in literature – the final paragraph of Ruskin's autobiographical Praeterita. In it he recalls his last visit to Siena, with his American friend and correspondent Charles Eliot Norton, and he remembers the fireflies...

'Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly gold sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit," and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.'

A wonderfully haunting ending is that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The narrator, and the party he is with (on the Thames in London), have just heard the last of Marlow's terrible tale...

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.' 

Here is the closest Samuel Beckett ever came to a happy ending – the beautiful, pared-to-the-bone closing passage of Ill Seen Ill Said:

'Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.'

I was going to post the closing passage of The Trial, but really it's just too grim. Instead, here are a couple of endings from left field. First, the resonantly abrupt original ending of Mark's Gospel – 

'And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.'

And finally, a diversion into poetry, though it is could be classified as prose poetry – Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, in which the past and the present, the lives of King Offa and of the young Geoffrey Hill, intermingle to extraordinary effect. For some reason, I find the ending quite wonderful: 

'[XXIX]

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, 
  outclassed forefathers, I too concede. I am your
  staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the
         gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered
         into the last dream of Offa the King.

[XXX]

And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-
       wards us            he vanished

he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of
       red mud.'


It's probably just me...