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End | Dec 04 2003

I’ve collected our emails in a single document, and I’ve been adding to it as I write or receive new emails. The document is now a hundred pages long, not counting the current email. Seeing this, I can’t help wonder how long the document may become, in the end. This makes me think of something I’ve thought before, which is that it’s unfortunate that one always knows in advance how long a novel or story or poem is. I mean, before reading it. Because that knowledge affects how one experiences what one reads. Here I imagine a text whose length is unknown to the reader. You see only one line or one group of lines at a time. To move forward, you push a button, and another line or group of lines appear.

How wretched an idea this is. Imagine reading a story that may be a thousand words long, or a thousand pages long, or anywhere in between, you have no way of knowing. It would be maddening. And yet that’s what a relationship is: a story of unknown duration. I suppose the difference is that a relationship, as lived, is unwritten, with no ending to peak at.

This reminds me that The Tempest is considered a romance because of how it ends. Romances end with marriage, and tragedies end with death, or something equally awful.