November 2021
Author’s Notes
I laboured over the last couple of sentences in the final chapter of An Incoming Tide.
In contrast, the first sentence of the novel fell from my fingertips into my MacBook keyboard quickly, never to be revised.
For much of the initial writing, I really didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. The essential elements of the plot just unfolded as I wrote them. I didn’t need to know. But when the end came, it was hard work. (For further reflection on this, you might want to check out my October 2021 blog on Flow versus Focus).
And now, we come to Leonard, poor Leonard in this parable I wrote about fifteen years ago. Much of his anxious life would have been tortured by that degree of uncertainty, an emerging plot heading toward an unpredictable close.
Perhaps you have met someone like him.
I laboured over the last couple of sentences in the final chapter of An Incoming Tide.
In contrast, the first sentence of the novel fell from my fingertips into my MacBook keyboard quickly, never to be revised.
For much of the initial writing, I really didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. The essential elements of the plot just unfolded as I wrote them. I didn’t need to know. But when the end came, it was hard work. (For further reflection on this, you might want to check out my October 2021 blog on Flow versus Focus).
And now, we come to Leonard, poor Leonard in this parable I wrote about fifteen years ago. Much of his anxious life would have been tortured by that degree of uncertainty, an emerging plot heading toward an unpredictable close.
Perhaps you have met someone like him.
Life Without End
When reading a novel Leonard typically turned to the back of the book and checked to see how many pages it contained. As he read, he mentally kept track of how close he was to the end of the story.
When there were yet a hundred pages to go, Leonard would typically comment to himself that he couldn’t foresee how the author would be able to satisfy all the complications of plot in the mere one hundred pages left. At fifty pages to go, Leonard would typically start grieving in anticipation of losing the relationships he had developed with certain of the characters. Some characters he would gladly be done with, others would leave a hole in Leonard’s heart.
And after the pinnacle of plot, when the characters were winding themselves into the ether of having lived their part and had little left to do, when Leonard was about five or ten pages from the end, he would look at the remaining words in the book and wonder what of any significance the author could say in those words left to be read. It was done and reading the last paragraphs was just an obligation.
Leonard lived with the troubling sense that he was a novel without an end. It bothered him. How does one look at the bookmark of the present and gauge whether life is half done, or two thirds, or 99%? Not being able to tell worried Leonard a great deal. Was anyone measuring his life? If no one—not an author, an editor nor a god—was willing to say “Leonard, you better start resolving some of the absurdities of your life story now, not much time to go“ how could he make sense of what he needed to do? If no one was able to tell him to make peace with a certain other person, or tidy up business dealings, or put an irritable coworker in his place once and for all, or even just to move and start all over—if no one could tell Leonard it was time to draw a certain intimacy to a tearful close, what would happen to him and all those other people who habitually hung around his life?
How does one just live from day-to-day not assured that there was a knowable final ending, the drama of character development and circumstances slipping satisfactorily inside a back cover to be placed once again on the shelf?
And so, Leonard decided that he had to know.
Leonard had a friend, Julie, who used to say “when your day to die comes, on that day you will die.” She said this when she talked about car accidents and cancer and probably would have said the same to a downtrodden woman who had the misery of living out her life in a warzone. Leonard took this to mean that the final day of life for each of us is fixed somewhere in some great record book of life. Leonard thought Julie believed that when we were born a symbolic mortuary tag was tied to our big toe, naming the date—nothing could change that day. Perhaps, if one had lived a strong and healthy life, had arranged personal finances so that there was sufficient saved for retirement, and had cultured goodness in all relationships, that, on that fixed day, a piano would fall from a twelfth floor balcony overhead as the person walked on the sidewalk below. Out that poor soul would go under a curl of piano wire, impaled on the sidewalk by an ebony front leg of a baby grand—or even a full grand for that matter.
And that would not need to be gruesome nor particularly untoward because that person’s last thought could have been of a wonderfully attractive person of the opposite sex walking ahead on the same sidewalk, or the savoring of the residual taste of a latte and tiramisu from the deli just departed, or even the soaring line of the middle movement of a Mozart piano sonata, graceful and comforting as it descended.
People like Julie would attend the funeral and say how his day had come. He could have died of anything that day—a particularly lethal virus, a broken heart or a falling piano. Alas, it was the latter.
And Leonard had a particularly religious friend, Jon, who thought that days are numbered by a great Accountant God with a feathered pen writing on an oversized scroll resting on a dais made of ornate wood, carved in an Italian style, sitting just off of the red carpet which passed by gates of gold and pearl. Jon thought of God as a dispenser of life, and by corollary of death as well, numbering one’s days as a diversion from numbering other things too, like the hairs of one’s head and the grievousness of one’s sins.
The falling grand piano, ready to make its own exit from life with a mighty sforzando, would by God’s grace and mercy take the more ordinary life below with it. And such would be just. While mysterious to us mere mortals, it would make great cosmic sense allowing the proper order of souls to be maintained.
And, Leonard had an agnostic friend who, upon Leonard’s commenting about death and the possibility of something thereafter, said nothing, just stared blankly and shrugged.
None of this was satisfactory to Leonard.
He had to know.
Upon reaching that specific point in his 42 years, once Leonard had decided that he had to know, he began to extract clues about the date of his death. All of these had surrounded Leonard up until that point in his life and he had just ignored them.
For example, twice a day his digital clock read 3:18. The eighteenth day of the third month. It had been right there all the time and Leonard in his oblivion had ignored it, even slept through it half of the time. When he was reading he would now stop at page 318 and reflect on the weight of the story, how horrible it would be for the story to be truncated there, but also how an author could make something of that. Yes, the author could write an epilogue for the reader after abruptly suspending all action, just to make the point of how pointless it was. Then Leonard would sigh, and walk around, and feel the full weight of the significance of it all, and perhaps go for a pee before settling back into the story realizing that while 318 was significant for him, it was not for that particular novel. The novel had a page 319 and so forth, and would proceed and come to its own tidy conclusion.
But for Leonard, while the firmness of 318 was fine, it didn’t accomplish the full goal in his morbid realization—he needed to know what year.
Leonard decided to make a list of the last two digits of the calendar years (’08, ’09 and so on) from where he was in life now and what would be suitable ending to his life should he live it out with a better than normal life expectancy. Fifty-two such dates stared back at him, from age 42 to 94 (he thought that was being a bit generous but somehow the figure seemed right to him, right to go that far). Fifty-two was divisible by 4 and so he had four columns of 13 rows. He tacked it to his fridge.
Alas, on a particular March 7, Leonard realized that the year had come up. He did not know how or why this had happened but he had a strong and irreversible sense that he had only another eleven days to live.
Leonard had been fascinated by the Halley’s Comet Cult and its prediction of the destruction of the world with the close pass of the comet, all hope resting on the rescuing spaceship that would snatch believers in just the nick of time.
Back then, it seemed so crazy. Not any more—misguided and perhaps a bit pitiful yes, but crazy, no. Leonard could see the seduction of fervent belief in something that absolutely transcends life coming to bear on it. Eleven days before his March 18th, he had that same sense that the Halley’s Comet Cult members must have had. The day seemed so insanely close, so absolutely right, so complex, so deeply knowable.
Leonard put his life in order.
On the day, 3-18, Leonard ate a particularly satisfying set of meals, meals that he had planned to savor as the best of this world, Leonard had selected a sequence of music CDs to play—the celestial Allegri’s Miserere, the stately Mussorgsky Great Gate at Kiev, and the rock classic Stairway to Heaven. He shaved particularly thoroughly, wore better clothing than he typically did, and used mouthwash after each meal.
He went to bed convinced that his fate would have him die in his sleep, and such was a particularly favorable way to go.
He awoke on March 19th.
Leonard knew he wasn’t wrong about the date. His awaking on March 19th must be to a new age—if not within the cosmos, at least within himself. Leonard wasn’t particularly surprised that he awoke with the same body, had a host of the same memories, and even some of the wisdom that he had accumulated in the previous life. He still remembered Julie and Jon and his agnostic friend, although he felt a little sorry for all three of them now. He had passed across some great divide and now related to them from a subtle other side.
Leonard noticed striking differences in his own mind and values. He had little tolerance for politics, with all its power and posturing, and even less for gossip. In fact all matter of news, both broadcast and whispered, seemed irrelevant to him now. He couldn’t tolerate the inset of time-remaining and score when he watched a sporting event on television, although he was deeply impressed with athleticism and grace of movement.
And Leonard read his novels differently, without a need to know the end, without impatience or worry about the lines of plot or what would happen to characters after their use to the author had expired. He read for the words right before him.
Time no longer stretched out as a runner partway through a race, but lasted only a fraction of a second. He was no longer situated in that context of a narrow now squished between a determining before and consequential after. That was gone.
Leonard now stood on an earth of great geology beneath and a succession of atmospheres above. And, he stood in the sun.
Author’s Afterword.
Leonard’s body was found two years later. Julie found it. The cause of death was undetermined, although not suspicious. There wasn’t a piano in sight.
Life Without End
When reading a novel Leonard typically turned to the back of the book and checked to see how many pages it contained. As he read, he mentally kept track of how close he was to the end of the story.
When there were yet a hundred pages to go, Leonard would typically comment to himself that he couldn’t foresee how the author would be able to satisfy all the complications of plot in the mere one hundred pages left. At fifty pages to go, Leonard would typically start grieving in anticipation of losing the relationships he had developed with certain of the characters. Some characters he would gladly be done with, others would leave a hole in Leonard’s heart.
And after the pinnacle of plot, when the characters were winding themselves into the ether of having lived their part and had little left to do, when Leonard was about five or ten pages from the end, he would look at the remaining words in the book and wonder what of any significance the author could say in those words left to be read. It was done and reading the last paragraphs was just an obligation.
Leonard lived with the troubling sense that he was a novel without an end. It bothered him. How does one look at the bookmark of the present and gauge whether life is half done, or two thirds, or 99%? Not being able to tell worried Leonard a great deal. Was anyone measuring his life? If no one—not an author, an editor nor a god—was willing to say “Leonard, you better start resolving some of the absurdities of your life story now, not much time to go“ how could he make sense of what he needed to do? If no one was able to tell him to make peace with a certain other person, or tidy up business dealings, or put an irritable coworker in his place once and for all, or even just to move and start all over—if no one could tell Leonard it was time to draw a certain intimacy to a tearful close, what would happen to him and all those other people who habitually hung around his life?
How does one just live from day-to-day not assured that there was a knowable final ending, the drama of character development and circumstances slipping satisfactorily inside a back cover to be placed once again on the shelf?
And so, Leonard decided that he had to know.
Leonard had a friend, Julie, who used to say “when your day to die comes, on that day you will die.” She said this when she talked about car accidents and cancer and probably would have said the same to a downtrodden woman who had the misery of living out her life in a warzone. Leonard took this to mean that the final day of life for each of us is fixed somewhere in some great record book of life. Leonard thought Julie believed that when we were born a symbolic mortuary tag was tied to our big toe, naming the date—nothing could change that day. Perhaps, if one had lived a strong and healthy life, had arranged personal finances so that there was sufficient saved for retirement, and had cultured goodness in all relationships, that, on that fixed day, a piano would fall from a twelfth floor balcony overhead as the person walked on the sidewalk below. Out that poor soul would go under a curl of piano wire, impaled on the sidewalk by an ebony front leg of a baby grand—or even a full grand for that matter.
And that would not need to be gruesome nor particularly untoward because that person’s last thought could have been of a wonderfully attractive person of the opposite sex walking ahead on the same sidewalk, or the savoring of the residual taste of a latte and tiramisu from the deli just departed, or even the soaring line of the middle movement of a Mozart piano sonata, graceful and comforting as it descended.
People like Julie would attend the funeral and say how his day had come. He could have died of anything that day—a particularly lethal virus, a broken heart or a falling piano. Alas, it was the latter.
And Leonard had a particularly religious friend, Jon, who thought that days are numbered by a great Accountant God with a feathered pen writing on an oversized scroll resting on a dais made of ornate wood, carved in an Italian style, sitting just off of the red carpet which passed by gates of gold and pearl. Jon thought of God as a dispenser of life, and by corollary of death as well, numbering one’s days as a diversion from numbering other things too, like the hairs of one’s head and the grievousness of one’s sins.
The falling grand piano, ready to make its own exit from life with a mighty sforzando, would by God’s grace and mercy take the more ordinary life below with it. And such would be just. While mysterious to us mere mortals, it would make great cosmic sense allowing the proper order of souls to be maintained.
And, Leonard had an agnostic friend who, upon Leonard’s commenting about death and the possibility of something thereafter, said nothing, just stared blankly and shrugged.
None of this was satisfactory to Leonard.
He had to know.
Upon reaching that specific point in his 42 years, once Leonard had decided that he had to know, he began to extract clues about the date of his death. All of these had surrounded Leonard up until that point in his life and he had just ignored them.
For example, twice a day his digital clock read 3:18. The eighteenth day of the third month. It had been right there all the time and Leonard in his oblivion had ignored it, even slept through it half of the time. When he was reading he would now stop at page 318 and reflect on the weight of the story, how horrible it would be for the story to be truncated there, but also how an author could make something of that. Yes, the author could write an epilogue for the reader after abruptly suspending all action, just to make the point of how pointless it was. Then Leonard would sigh, and walk around, and feel the full weight of the significance of it all, and perhaps go for a pee before settling back into the story realizing that while 318 was significant for him, it was not for that particular novel. The novel had a page 319 and so forth, and would proceed and come to its own tidy conclusion.
But for Leonard, while the firmness of 318 was fine, it didn’t accomplish the full goal in his morbid realization—he needed to know what year.
Leonard decided to make a list of the last two digits of the calendar years (’08, ’09 and so on) from where he was in life now and what would be suitable ending to his life should he live it out with a better than normal life expectancy. Fifty-two such dates stared back at him, from age 42 to 94 (he thought that was being a bit generous but somehow the figure seemed right to him, right to go that far). Fifty-two was divisible by 4 and so he had four columns of 13 rows. He tacked it to his fridge.
Alas, on a particular March 7, Leonard realized that the year had come up. He did not know how or why this had happened but he had a strong and irreversible sense that he had only another eleven days to live.
Leonard had been fascinated by the Halley’s Comet Cult and its prediction of the destruction of the world with the close pass of the comet, all hope resting on the rescuing spaceship that would snatch believers in just the nick of time.
Back then, it seemed so crazy. Not any more—misguided and perhaps a bit pitiful yes, but crazy, no. Leonard could see the seduction of fervent belief in something that absolutely transcends life coming to bear on it. Eleven days before his March 18th, he had that same sense that the Halley’s Comet Cult members must have had. The day seemed so insanely close, so absolutely right, so complex, so deeply knowable.
Leonard put his life in order.
On the day, 3-18, Leonard ate a particularly satisfying set of meals, meals that he had planned to savor as the best of this world, Leonard had selected a sequence of music CDs to play—the celestial Allegri’s Miserere, the stately Mussorgsky Great Gate at Kiev, and the rock classic Stairway to Heaven. He shaved particularly thoroughly, wore better clothing than he typically did, and used mouthwash after each meal.
He went to bed convinced that his fate would have him die in his sleep, and such was a particularly favorable way to go.
He awoke on March 19th.
Leonard knew he wasn’t wrong about the date. His awaking on March 19th must be to a new age—if not within the cosmos, at least within himself. Leonard wasn’t particularly surprised that he awoke with the same body, had a host of the same memories, and even some of the wisdom that he had accumulated in the previous life. He still remembered Julie and Jon and his agnostic friend, although he felt a little sorry for all three of them now. He had passed across some great divide and now related to them from a subtle other side.
Leonard noticed striking differences in his own mind and values. He had little tolerance for politics, with all its power and posturing, and even less for gossip. In fact all matter of news, both broadcast and whispered, seemed irrelevant to him now. He couldn’t tolerate the inset of time-remaining and score when he watched a sporting event on television, although he was deeply impressed with athleticism and grace of movement.
And Leonard read his novels differently, without a need to know the end, without impatience or worry about the lines of plot or what would happen to characters after their use to the author had expired. He read for the words right before him.
Time no longer stretched out as a runner partway through a race, but lasted only a fraction of a second. He was no longer situated in that context of a narrow now squished between a determining before and consequential after. That was gone.
Leonard now stood on an earth of great geology beneath and a succession of atmospheres above. And, he stood in the sun.
Author’s Afterword.
Leonard’s body was found two years later. Julie found it. The cause of death was undetermined, although not suspicious. There wasn’t a piano in sight.
Comments received (published here with the commenter's permission) . . .
"Favourite part was 'all matter of news, both broadcast and whispered, seemed irrelevant to him now'. I chuckled at the lack of a piano - nicely done." — C.S.
"Great parable! I believe at any moment in our lives we can make the decision to die to our old self and start a fresh new day. It reminds me of a quote that came across my desk one day that reads: I wasn’t happy with my life the way it was so I decided to make it different and it was." — C. B.
"Well, it was interesting. I'm not all that much like Leonard, after all. I just feel closer to the end of my physical life than when I was younger. I feel a certain sense of need to "get things done" -- and am trying to enjoy more of nature, living with less in the way of material things. I have a faith practice, but not one that believes that God marks out our last day on earth; that would contradict the gift of free will she has given us. I don't believe God 'zaps' us with terminal illnesses or "comes to take us home" on a specific day at a specific time, nor am I looking for that. Poor Leonard..." — M.B. (yes, M.B., poor Leonard!)