The Sense of an Ending
If you are a kind of person who is only average at everything: life and career, the book “The sense of an ending” might help you to reflect the reason why you are who you are. The story or plot in this book is not extraordinary but author’s descriptions and psychological analysis are. Following are some great lines and paragraphs in the book:
Great Lines:
- We live in time – it holds us and moulds us.
- Is there annoying more plausible than a second hand (note: clock)? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down;
- It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
- I also liked the way it wobbled. It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.
Humous Lines:
- Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.
- This was one of the differences between the three of us and or new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.
Brilliant Paragraph:
‘We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?’
‘History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly.
‘Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated . Simpson?’
Colin was more prepared than me. ‘History is raw onion sandwich, sir.’
‘For what reason?’
‘It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.’
‘Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn’t you say?’
We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria.
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History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
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though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practised. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers. And something like that happens more generally, doesn’t it? The more you learn, the less you fear. ‘Learn’ not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
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To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And if so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these signs are limited, Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble?
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But Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands – and then out of them. How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of lie. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition an increase.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication? And this game me a sense of unease, of unrest.
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But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.
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When you’re young – when I was young – you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you wan them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
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The time-deniers say: forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse, As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.
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