The Last Paragraph of Charles Wright's The Messenger

The Last Paragraph of Charles Wright's The Messenger

 

I didn't say anything. Suddenly I didn't care. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I knew I wouldn't sleep just yet. Tomorrow I'll sleep on the bus, but now Shirley and I will climb the stairs together, back to my drunken friends upstairs. The party had turned into a free-for-all; I could hear their voices wild above the music, searching for that crazy kick that would still the fears, confusion, and the pain of being alive on this early August morning.  

"What's wrong?" Shirley asked. "Charles, what's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said. "Absolutley nothing."

We started up the stairs and then I heard Claudia's voice, as clear as day, scream, "C-----!" 

The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow”

The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

And the rainbow stood on earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they could cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. 

The last page of Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi Strauss

The last page of Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi Strauss

 

Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society alone among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us provided we are alive and the world is in existence a precarious arch that points towards the inaccessible. 

 

The road which it indicates to us is one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may be open in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. 

 

This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, this chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends. Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying!

 

And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labors, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man; in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the blink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat. 

 

(Contributed by Elizabeth Ames) 

The Last Paragraph of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

The Last Paragraph of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling


She would hang a sign in the restaurant window---Owt to luntsch. Bee bak in a whale. For she could not spell either.

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head


I gave her back the bright light of the smile, now softening at last out of irony. "So must you, my dear!"

The Last Paragraph of David Shield's How Literature Saved My Life

The Last Paragraph of David Shield's How Literature Saved My Life

I wanted Literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this---which is what makes it essential.

The Last Lines of Romeo and Juliet

The Last Lines of Romeo and Juliet


For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych


He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

The Last Paragraph of Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter

The Last Paragraph of Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter



Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.

The Last Paragraph of Go Ask Alice

The Last Paragraph of Go Ask Alice


See ya.

The Last Stanza of the First Canto of Lord Bryon's Don Juan

The Last Stanza of the First Canto of Lord Bryon's Don Juan



                                                                   222

'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
    I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
   The world will find thee after many days.'
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
    I can't help putting in my claim to praise---
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
 For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.

The Last Paragraph Of The First Part of Don Quixote

The Last Paragraph Of The First Part of Don Quixote



"That may well be," responded the canon, "but by the orders I received, I do not remember seeing it. And even if I concede that it is there, I am not therefore obliged to believe the histories of so many Amadises, or those of that throng of knights about whom they tell us stories, nor is it reasonable for an honorable man like your grace, possessed of your qualities and fine understanding, to accept as true the countless absurd exaggerations that are written in those nonsensical books of chivalry."

The Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac's On the Road

The Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac's On the Road



So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

The Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species




Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The Last Paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

The Last Paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian


And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling all at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.