What The Hell America!

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Dear James,

Why, even when reading a book that I’m thoroughly enjoying, do I always seem to want to finish it?

Dear Reader,

This is a fascinating question.

I know exactly what you mean, of course—the slightly indecent haste to turn the final page, slurp up the final image, get the book logged in its entirety in your mental library. “I didn’t want it to end!” is something I have never said, or felt, about a book or anything else. I love endings. I always want it to end, whatever it is, so I can go away and privately cherish it (or rinse it out of my system, if necessary).

Reading itself, the act of reading, has its own linear left-to-right momentum: It would seem to sort of naturally speed up the further into a book you go. Somewhere in the opus of Nicholson Baker—and I’m going to be very Nicholson Baker about this (see: U and I) and produce a memory-mangled approximation of what he actually wrote—is a lovely passage about how a reader will accelerate as the end of a book approaches, because they are unconsciously picking up the acceleration of the writer, the headlong here-we-go, wrapping-it-up energy of the last phase of composition.

But I think your question relates more to the nature of experience itself. Or at least it gives me an excuse to do some of my bargain-basement philosophizing. To wit: Why can we not rest in the moment? Why must we always be panting for the next moment and the one after that? Because we’re narrative animals, I think—and stories go forward. The good ones, anyway. And why must we always be pining for the moment that has passed? Because the really good stories go forward and backward at the same time. Like The Bourne Identity.

Not that you asked, but this may be why I gave up meditation: Deep down, I don’t want to hop off the wheel. Deep down, I want to be spun, driven, chewed on, buffeted by illusions, and scratched by demons. Or flicked in the earlobe by an angel, as it may be.

Aware that I’ve gone slightly off topic but feeling okay about it,

James

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