A Meditation On Endings

Steve Winn ponders endings: “Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what’s come before — in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It’s a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off.”