Starting from the End

Yesterday was the Film Preview of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" - the last of the eight films. One film commentator said "it is beautiful that we knew it had to end". There is indeed a 'sweet poignancy' of that knowledge - that knowing increases the richness of the tone and experience.

This reminds me of the interview with screen writer Dennis Potter in the last few weeks of his life when he described the beauty of seeing the cherry blossom, an experience enhanced by the knowledge it was the last time he would see it. The intensity coming from "the impossibility of further possibility" (Heidegger).

I have had a recent personal experience of this. My US friends Margo, Mark and Adrienne have performed as a band (Mad Agnes) for the last ten years and I have had the joy of hearing them play live on a number of occassions (including having them play at my 50th birthday party). A year ago Adrienne came to the difficult decision to stop, tired of being on the road and touring. They honoroured the process of that ending (not just for themselves but for their fans as well) by planning a final year - four seasons of concerts including their final UK tour last month. I went to one of the gigs and had both a smile and tears on my face for most of the time - relishing the exquisite sound of their music, lyrics, voices and harmonies and at the same time feeling sadness for the knowledge I would not hear that rich live sound again. In their final newsletter to their fans they quote T.S. Eliot - "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from".

C.S. Lewis, in his book 'A Grief Observed' intimately describes his experience of loss after the death of his wife. He says "we think of this as love cut short: like a dance stopped in mid career.... something truncated and therefore lacking its due shape" but moves on to say " it is not a truncation of the process, but one of its phases, not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure".

These different things lead me to think of endings being transitions. Any period of change is an ending, a transition and a beginning. Organisations end, bands break up, relationships end, people leave a job after many years, old ways of doing things are replaced by new structures ...even newspapers (News of the World closing at the end of this week). Beginnings and endings are happening all the time - and sometimes we can feel the beauty in that.