The End

Itʼs the ʼ80s. Iʼm young, single, living in Brooklyn, and Iʼve rediscovered baseball as a New York Mets fan.  Reading Roger Angellʼs book Late Innings, I run across an observation about the aging Mets catcher Jerry Grote. Grote was apparently a notoriously prickly player who despised reporters, but as his career winds down heʼs realized that if he wants to be remembered fondly post-retirement heʼll have to mend fences with the journalists heʼs spent his career pissing off. Angell, though, isnʼt buying what Grote is selling, so he asks: Why is Jerry Grote saying hello when itʼs time to say goodbye?

Thatʼs the question you ask of yourself when the end is far closer than the beginning.

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“The horror!  The horror!”

—Marlin Brando as Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)

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I canʼt remember who made this comment or how accurately Iʼm quoting it, but itʼs something like this: The young man is different and proud of it; the old man is different and horrified by it.

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Madam Lifeʼs a Piece in Bloom

Madam Lifeʼs a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
Sheʼs the tenant of the room,
Heʼs the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But heʼll trap you in the end,
And heʼll stick you for her price.

With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;

But sheʼs heard it all before,
Well she knows youʼve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.

—William Ernest Henley

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THOMPSON

In case youʼd like to know, Mr. Bernstein, heʼs at the Huntington Memorial Hospital on 180th Street.

BERNSTEIN

You donʼt say!  Why I had no idea —

THOMPSON

Nothing particular the matter with him, they tell me.  Just —

BERNSTEIN

Just old age.  (Smiles sadly)  Itʼs the only disease, Mr. Thompson, you donʼt look forward to being cured of.

— From the shooting script, dated July 16, 1940, for Citizen Kane (1941)

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“Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death — who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of the waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue.  When the commonplace ‘We must all die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die — and soon’, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2)