Offering: Solstice 2024
The end
“The only thing in the world worth beginning: The end of the world of course.”
— Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to a Native Land
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Around this time of year I tend to feel like it’s my job to stuff an unruly animal (the past year) into a box (of what it all meant) and then offer that up in public (through this newsletter, which is aptly named Offerings).
Every December, I imagine doing some sort of end-of-year wrap-up which I quickly reject; so much goes on in a year’s worth of newsletters and the idea of recounting it all’s too overwhelming. But I’ve been reading and thinking about the word end lately, and it feels like perfect timing to share a bit about that.
I’m in the final pages of psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear’s book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. In it, Lear argues that mourning constitutes both our development and flourishing as humans.
His has been some of the most enticing language on mourning I’ve found; namely that as erotic beings we “come to life” after losing, transforming “what would otherwise be a mere change into loss” through suffering.
In a certain sense we make loss by mourning, in the unique “emotion-filled way” that we do. For Lear, this keeping loss present through a process of active imagining, creating, and maintaining absences is “a basic mode of human being.”
When I began reading the book, I assumed that Lear’s use of the word end in the title was meant to describe the end of a life, relationship, world, or even habitable Earth. And he does use the word end in that way.
But he also uses it to describe an intended purpose, as in “means to an end.” In this second sense, to imagine the end is to imagine what matters, and to perform one’s meaningful part toward whatever that is.
One thing from the year that I have been remembering is a period of time in the early summer that I spent trying to understand these lines from poet Aimé Césaire:
What can I do?
One must begin somewhere.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world worth beginning:
The End of the world of course.1
The words are beautiful, but have felt like a puzzle.