Editor’s Be aware: Is something ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Each Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Inform him about your lifelong or in-the-moment issues at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Expensive James,
Why, even when studying a e-book that I’m totally having fun with, do I all the time appear to wish to end it?
Expensive Reader,
This can be a fascinating query.
I do know precisely what you imply, after all—the marginally indecent haste to show the ultimate web page, slurp up the ultimate picture, get the e-book logged in its entirety in your psychological library. “I didn’t need it to finish!” is one thing I’ve by no means mentioned, or felt, a few e-book or anything. I like endings. I all the time need it to finish, no matter it’s, so I can go away and privately cherish it (or rinse it out of my system, if vital).
Studying itself, the act of studying, has its personal linear left-to-right momentum: It will appear to kind of naturally pace up the additional right into a e-book you go. Someplace within the opus of Nicholson Baker—and I’m going to be very Nicholson Baker about this (see: U and I) and produce a memory-mangled approximation of what he really wrote—is a stunning passage about how a reader will speed up as the tip of a e-book approaches, as a result of they’re unconsciously selecting up the acceleration of the author, the headlong here-we-go, wrapping-it-up vitality of the final part of composition.
However I believe your query relates extra to the character of expertise itself. Or no less than it provides me an excuse to do a few of my bargain-basement philosophizing. To wit: Why can we not relaxation within the second? Why should we all the time be panting for the subsequent second and the one after that? As a result of we’re narrative animals, I believe—and tales go ahead. The nice ones, anyway. And why should we all the time be pining for the second that has handed? As a result of the actually good tales go ahead and backward on the identical time. Like The Bourne Id.
Not that you simply requested, however this can be why I gave up meditation: Deep down, I don’t wish to hop off the wheel. Deep down, I wish to be spun, pushed, chewed on, buffeted by illusions, and scratched by demons. Or flicked within the earlobe by an angel, as it might be.
Conscious that I’ve gone barely off matter however feeling okay about it,
James
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