Excerpt: Fish in Dreamland - part 2

There is something hard about endings.

It is not so much that it is always hard to bring something to an end, although frequently it is. It is just that when you have a story to tell, it is hard to know when to end and it is even more difficult to know how to end. If you are telling the story of your life, it is nearly impossible to give it a proper ending, because your life isn’t over yet, so how can you know how it will end?

In the 1970’s, movie makers began making films that had no proper ending. They were not so much stories, as they were snapshots of a moment in time. And like snapshots, they were just there, showing a brief picture and not the whole story. It can be argued that these type of non-endings were good because they left it up to the audience to decide what would happen in the end. The viewer could decide if the couple lived happily ever after or if they simply left and never saw each other again. And I suppose you could argue further that it says a lot about a person which ending they would decide upon. Myself, I always hated those non-endings. I personally always preferred stories with ‘real’ endings.

Of course, you could also look at it from the point of view of the physics thought experiment about Schrodinger’s Cat. The cat was in the box with a radioactive material. As long as the box was closed, there was no way of knowing if the poor kitty was alive or dead. The chances were just about equal either way, and all the possibilities were open. He might be alive or dead or half-dead or half-alive or somewhere in between. You would never know until you looked. The catch is, once you look, you know for sure what has happened, but all of the other possibilities have been eliminated.

And so it is with the end of stories. Do you really want to choose just one possibility and eliminate all of the others? A person’s life is always unfolding, and every day there are new possibilities. How do you choose a point at which you cut off the remaining possibilities and say to yourself and everyone else, “This is it, this is all the further we go. The story ends here, there are no more possible things to tell.”