On Finishing

GH reaches another end

After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion. . . .

Like Edward Gibbon in Lausanne in 1793, I also finished a book yesterday. Unlike Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had taken a decade’s intense work, mine involved not quite two years’ intermittent scrivening, and is a comparatively small story - albeit, as is a custom of mine, one that gestures to a larger and on-going story. Yet the telling of every story is its own story, has a beginning, middle and end. Which is why I have always cherished these lines of Gibbons, because he gets it - the sense of release, the hint of hope, and the feeling of loss at what is after all a separation from something previously intimate, that occupied so much of your energy, curiosity and, yes, love.

When I say that I finished a book, the book is not quite finished with me. I handed over a USB with a manuscript and more than fifty accompanying images to a designer friend, and it will return in laid-out pages for me to scan. But to me, books are finished when you share them, when they cease to be yours alone. I have in the past likened books to relationships, in that you know the other so closely, so tightly, that the join blurs; then comes the parting, all passion spent, all possibilities exhausted. You’ll bump into that old flame down the track, but it will never be the same between you; they will be out and about making new friends, and you’ll have moved on too.