Finished The Brothers Karamazov this morning, which I have been reading since October. Three months with a book is its own kind of relationship — you carry the characters around with you, you notice when the world rhymes with the fiction, you are in some sense not alone.
And now it is done.
There is a particular grief in finishing a great book. It is not unlike the grief of leaving a place you loved: you know you can return, but you know the first time is gone. You cannot read Karamazov for the first time again. That experience — the not-knowing, the unfolding, the surprise of Alyosha — is finished.
I have started keeping a log of last lines.
The last line of Karamazov is this:
Hurrah for Karamazov!
Dostoevsky gives the final word to the children. After nine hundred pages of philosophy and suffering and grace, he ends with a cry of pure joy from the young. I don’t know what to do with that except to feel it.
Other last lines I love:
Mrs. Dalloway: “For there she was.” — It is the whole novel in four words. A person seen. The miracle of presence.
Gilead: “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.” — Marilynne Robinson, and Ames, at rest at last.
The Road: “She was glorious.” — McCarthy’s last sentence about a woman whose name we never learn, and somehow the brutality of the whole book is redeemed.
I find I cannot immediately begin another book after finishing something great. I need a day or two of sitting with the ending, the way you need time after a long conversation to let it settle.
This is not laziness. Or maybe it is, but it is productive laziness — the kind that lets things metabolize.
What I am reading next, eventually: The Confessions of Augustine. This feels like the right thing after Dostoevsky. Both are men in the middle of their lives, looking backward, trying to understand the story that made them. Both are formally brilliant. Both are, in the end, about grace.
I am in no hurry.