Orts #744

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities
     -- Voltaire, in an essay, Questions sur les miracles (1765)
 

Time, the ever-fickle berserker, brings the happy ending that it eventually undoes. Add a few more days, months, years to where the dire narrative ends and new forms emerge, beads of light suddenly cling to what was once a darkness. Perhaps the forlorn boy of “Araby” eventually gets the girl; the king, once in prison, returns to seize an empire. The happy ending relies on patience— but not too much. Add even more time, and the story curdles: desire momentarily sated, the boy becomes insufferable; the king is made a fool of. Someone calls for everyone’s head. Real life intervenes, and makes its mess of things.
     — a footnote in The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti (2013)
 
 
 
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
     — Orson Welles, in his screenplay for The Big Brass Ring (early 1980s)
 
 
 
To make Routine a Stimulus
Remember it can cease —
Capacity to Terminate
Is a Specific Grace —
 
      — Emily Dickinson