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Dear James,

Why, even if I read a book that I thoroughly enjoyed, I always seem to want to finish it?

Dear readers,

This is an interesting question.

Of course, I know exactly what you mean - a slightly indecent rush to open the last page, shortening the final image, logging in to the full book in your psych library. "I don't want it to end!" is something I've never said or felt about a book or anything else. I like the ending. I've always wanted it to end, whatever it is, so I can cherish it privately (or flush it out if necessary in my system).

Reading itself, is the act of reading, with a linear momentum from left to right: it seems to naturally accelerate the book you walk through. Somewhere in Nicholson Baker’s work - I’ll be very Nicholson Baker on this (see: You and me) 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 is more about the nature of the experience itself. Or at least it gives me an excuse to do the philosophicalization of my bargaining. Witness: Why can’t we rest now? Why do we have to always breathe in the next and then? I think because we are narrative animals, and the story moves forward. Anyway, OK. Why do we have to always nail the moment of the past? Because a real good story goes forward and backward at the same time. like Bourne Identity.

Not what you asked, but that's probably why I gave up on meditation: Deep, I don't want to jump off the steering wheel. Deep, I want to be rotated, driven, chewed, burned by hallucinations and scratched by demons. Or flashing on the earlobe like a possible angel.

Realizing that I was a bit off topic, but I felt pretty good about it.

James

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