Some notes on "The End of the Point", by Elizabeth Graver
In a weird way, this book reminds me of To the Lighthouse. At least in the parallel form of time passing for humans as represented in time passing in a home, but in this case, it's in a town. The inevitability of change in our surroundings and in our selves. How things get better and worse and how ultimately, in this weird way, they are both the same. The book has five chapters, each indicative of the passing time.
Time must pass. We must age. We must die. Change must occur. It's not like its optional. Maybe the resistance against aging and ultimately death comes from the desire to believe it is optional; that we can control time and our own mortality. But why?
Time is like this wave that carries everything along on it towards an unknown and ever changing horizon. I don't really mean it metaphorically, but we move towards a future that has no shape until we get to it. But that "now" has to be interpreted through the past that we've carried with us. We have no other way to do so, so it's always through this window (like in To the Lighthouse) that frames the present with a certain specificity. We can "see" no other way (it's the endless self-referential problem that is really at the heart of knowledge and we are always limited by it).
In the novel, the island of Ashaunt where the family has vacationed for generations is being rapidly rebuilt with big mansions and modern conveniences. Time can't be held back. Helen, when the book started she was a teenager on the island in the middle of WWII, is now dying of cancer in 1999 and visiting Ashaunt for the last time. She has finally learned all those lessons that we all wish we could somehow learn when we are 20 and not when we are 80: expectations of ourselves and others were too high; we pushed people away that we only wished to draw closer; that we can't change those we love no matter how hard we try and no matter how much we worry about them.
The decay of the house in "To the Lighthouse" and the decay in a different way of the land in "The End of the Point" though highlight the difference in human life passing even as those decays are similar. Human life has a mind as part of it (as far as I know houses and land do not), so even though the decay itself is inevitable and an effect of time, what is happening meanwhile is (mostly) up to the human. Both books, I think (it's been a while since I've read To the Lighthouse), are more about how we live (or don't). It reminds us of choices we make but also of actions we take that aren't really choices but feel like necessary or inevitable actions resulting from who we are at a given moment. When we look back at those events, we often feel a sense of dismay that we acted as we did or regret that we didn't do something differently. As if all events could have been enacted differently, when in fact many could not (and perhaps more importantly in the now, the past really has no meaning). At the end of "The End of the Point" Helen dies by drowning after having the best summer of her life. We know this is the best because she tells us many times but also because of how she tells us--not as if she's trying to convince herself of this fact but that she finally realizes how precious these last moments are. She is living in the face of death. Land and houses never are.
Time must pass. We must age. We must die. Change must occur. It's not like its optional. Maybe the resistance against aging and ultimately death comes from the desire to believe it is optional; that we can control time and our own mortality. But why?
Time is like this wave that carries everything along on it towards an unknown and ever changing horizon. I don't really mean it metaphorically, but we move towards a future that has no shape until we get to it. But that "now" has to be interpreted through the past that we've carried with us. We have no other way to do so, so it's always through this window (like in To the Lighthouse) that frames the present with a certain specificity. We can "see" no other way (it's the endless self-referential problem that is really at the heart of knowledge and we are always limited by it).
In the novel, the island of Ashaunt where the family has vacationed for generations is being rapidly rebuilt with big mansions and modern conveniences. Time can't be held back. Helen, when the book started she was a teenager on the island in the middle of WWII, is now dying of cancer in 1999 and visiting Ashaunt for the last time. She has finally learned all those lessons that we all wish we could somehow learn when we are 20 and not when we are 80: expectations of ourselves and others were too high; we pushed people away that we only wished to draw closer; that we can't change those we love no matter how hard we try and no matter how much we worry about them.
The decay of the house in "To the Lighthouse" and the decay in a different way of the land in "The End of the Point" though highlight the difference in human life passing even as those decays are similar. Human life has a mind as part of it (as far as I know houses and land do not), so even though the decay itself is inevitable and an effect of time, what is happening meanwhile is (mostly) up to the human. Both books, I think (it's been a while since I've read To the Lighthouse), are more about how we live (or don't). It reminds us of choices we make but also of actions we take that aren't really choices but feel like necessary or inevitable actions resulting from who we are at a given moment. When we look back at those events, we often feel a sense of dismay that we acted as we did or regret that we didn't do something differently. As if all events could have been enacted differently, when in fact many could not (and perhaps more importantly in the now, the past really has no meaning). At the end of "The End of the Point" Helen dies by drowning after having the best summer of her life. We know this is the best because she tells us many times but also because of how she tells us--not as if she's trying to convince herself of this fact but that she finally realizes how precious these last moments are. She is living in the face of death. Land and houses never are.
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