[HPforGrownups] What if she got run over by a truck?

[Aberforth's Goat]

No: HPFGUIDX 38488

Megs wrote,

> See my anxiety does not come from teh idea that one day the
story will be
> over, it comes from the idea that it hasn't been finished.

I agree entirely. But what I'm wondering about just now is
whether that anxiety - which we all feel, I think - isn't
something we ought to savor, rather than hope it'll be gone as
soon as possible. It's a bit like a suspended chord, where you
know that the fourth is supposed to be resolved up into a fifth
or down into a third - but feel that the dissonance creates a
sort of anxiety which has a beauty of it own.

There was this poet called Rilke - he's dead now, though I don't
think either a truck or a lorry or even a freight train had
anything to do with it - who wrote something I'd never heard of
till Amy asked me about it:

You, sir, are so young - so before every beginning -
and I would ask you, as best I can, dear
sir, to have patience toward all that is unsolved
in your heart and to try to love the questions
themselves like closed living-rooms
and like books written in a
very foreign language.

So why not take the next logical step of leaving the door closed
permanently - and go on enjoying the mystery of it all?

* * * * *

Betty wrote,

> *Na, these L.O.O.N.S'll never be satisfied.  You always find
questions
> to be asked and honestly some utterly rediculous theories have
come out
> of this group from time to time, but I digress.  You'll find
things to
> talk about after the seventh book.  Not every mystery can be
solved,
> especially since you are good at finding little nits to pick
and all
> that. (And I mean *you* toward the whole group.  Theories after
> theories, questions after questions, nitpick after nitpick ...
It's just
> what we do around here, though some are more prolific than
others.

Hm. Hm. Hmmm. Come to think, maybe that's what my point was.

Doesn't it *always* boil down to that? We think of a story as a
circle that needs to be completed, as suspended chord that needs
to be resolved. But perhaps for the circle never really closes.
For every answer, a new question crops up - for every
explanation, a new and more truculent Flint - for every sense of
closure a deeper sense of mystery - for every moment in which you
grasp the meaning, the realization that it has already escaped
you.

Is a book ever really "finished" - or do we just stop reading it?

And if so, could it be that an unfinished book allows a more
complete aesthetic experience than a finished one?

> By the way, I figured Mike had his tongue firmly in his cheek
when he
> wrote that post.  I found it rather amusing. (Grin)

I expect so - though when I asked him, he examined his tongue
carefully, made an incomprehensible goat noise and wandered off
to swallow a tin can.

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray)
_______________________

"Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, so that
may not have been bravery...."