“A
story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of
experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham
Greene
It is said that “there is more than one way to skin a cat”. There is also a song that laments, “breaking up is hard to do”. Saying goodbye can be abrupt, decisive, and final. It can be cruel and malevolent. Or it can be a drawn-out experience: excruciating, philosophical, and cathartic at the end.
Charlotte and Philip’s story is a cosmopolitan fairy tale: wealthy, dashing man meets pretty, young bookworm and they live happily ever after in Islamorada. Well, not quite. Philip is one busy man but after he got engaged to Charlotte, his business trips became inexplicably prolonged. Charlotte, after weighing things, decided on a painful course of action only to backpedal after a shattering experience. Running into an upscale New York restaurant called TINHIE, however, changed everything.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)
Tony Webster’s story unfolds slowly, gently, and then jarringly. At his age, he thinks life has become peaceable and should not hold any more surprises. After all, hasn’t he managed to stay friends with his ex-wife and maintain a good relationship with his daughter even after his divorce? Then out of the blue, he received a letter informing him that the mother of Veronica, girlfriend from a previous lifetime, has bequeathed to him some money and two documents. He is forced to confront a past that he had perfunctorily whitewashed. And here lies the heart of the matter as Veronica has jarringly put across Tony: “You don’t get it, but then you never did.”
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
Maurice Bendrix, a writer of some fame in the 1940s, sought out Henry and Sarah Miles, with the intention of surreptitiously gathering material and inspiration for his next book. Little did Maurice know that he will be catapulted into a relationship of unimaginable jealousy, suffering, and rage at how the universe has decided to arrange itself. This is a book that exhaustively takes on the moral aspects of a complicated relationship and its theological and mystical ramifications.
How does one know that it is the end? Graham Greene’s Bendrix rationalised: “Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you, matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”
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