(Novel: The Endless City)

The Endless City
Paul M. Rodriguez
Argiope, Print, Kindle.

The City is endless to the edges of the world. West and east, north and south, unbroken, the City goes on, long arterial highways spreading into streets and boulevards, nourishing the buildings that are born and age and die. It has always been this way; it must always be this way, the City of and for itself, the silent lives of empty rooms.

Men live here too. While the walls stand and the seals hold, their shelters are their homes. But seasons pass, and walls rot, and the old buildings make way for new. Men live here too. But they are few, and frightened, and afraid...

Finis

The ending is the most important part. Not in all arts: pictures are endless. Not even in music, where skipping ahead is bad faith. But in writing the ending is definitive. You do not know how a sentence is meant, whether you are being told or being asked, until you reach the end.

The problem with endings is that they are all a kind of punctuation, artificial because the criteria of a good ending are abstract. A speech sums up; a sonnet turns; a story rounds off when something recurs. The key determines the cadence.

I have good reasons to prolong the Ruricolist; I feel how much I owe to it. But I must admit that the Ruricolist is over. The essay series has its natural term. These have been long years and I am different from the man I was when I began. His clothes no longer fit.

In conversation we are improvisers. For our improvisation to succeed, we must be willing to take whatever comes, trusting the outcome as we trust one another. We never say all we meant to say, or everything we think of, but that is the point: as much as we spend, we leave enriched. Now, at the end, I can affirm what I wrote at the beginning: I wrote for myself – not for friends, not for followers, not for an audience, not for posterity. This was my end of a conversation. And since this was a conversation, it must end as all conversations do, with a kind of aposiopesis, when the bill arrives, the sun comes up, the car stops, and suddenly we part.

Notice

I find writing to be its own reward. But there is something cowardly in spending time amassing what is not to be shared. I have therefore created this blog and mean here to expose, at intervals tending towards weekly, something worth reading – even re-reading.

The name, The Ruricolist, is meant to recall the essay series of old, when they could stand alone: The Tatler, The Idler, The Rambler, and others. I mean to be similarly eclectic and similarly to space out essays with other forms – what I call caprices. But my mark is Baconian concentration and brevity, not smooth Augustan prolixity.

It would be worse to hide my political and religious principles than not to have them, but my intentions are strictly literary. I do not mean to advance, join, or create a faction. I believe as others believe, but I wear no uniform.

I write not for myself, not for friends, not for an audience, not for posterity: this is my end of a conversation.