It was a dark & stormy night: Favourite beginnings & endings

[j d worthington]

Another from Harlan Ellison, "All the Sounds of Fear":

Beginning:

"Give me some light!"

Cry: tormented, half-moan half-chant, cast out against a whispering darkness: a man wound in white, arms upflung to roistering shadows, sooty sockets where eyes had been, pleading, demanding, anger and hopelessness, anguish from the soul into the world. He stumbled, a step, two, faltering, weak, the man returned to the child, truying to find some exit from the washing sea of darkness in which he trembled.

"Give me some light!"

Around him a Greek chorus of sussurating voices. Plucking at his garments he staggered toward an intimation of sound, a resting place, a goal. The man in pain, the figure of all pain, all desperation, and nowhere in that circle of painful light was there release from his torment. Sandaled feet stepping, each one above an abyss, no hope and no safety; what can it mean to be so eternally blind?

Again, "Give me some light!"

The last tortured ripping of the words from a throat raw with the hopelessness of salvation. Then the man sank, to the shadows that moved in on him. The fact half-hidden in chiaroscuro, sharp black, blanched white, down and down into the grayness about his feet, the circle of blazing-white light pin-pointing him, a creature impaled on a shard of brilliance, till closing, closing, closing it swallowed him, all gone to black, darkness within and without, black even deeper, nothing, finis, end; silence.

Richard Becker, Oedipus, had played his first role. Twenty-four years later, he would play it again, as his last. But before that final performance's curtain could be rung, twenty-four years of greatness would have to strut across stages of life and theater and emotion.

Time, passing.


The end:

While inside Room 16, lying up against the far wall, his back against the soft passive padding, Richard Becker looked out at the door, at the corridor, at the world, forever.

Looked out as he had come, purely and simply.

Without a face. From his hairline to his chin, a blank, empty, featureless expanse. Empty. Silent. Devoid of sight or smell or sound. Blank and faceless, a creature God had never deigned to bless with a mirror to the world. His Method was now gone.

Richard Becker, actor, had played his last part, and had gone away, taking with him Richard Becker, a man who had known all the sounds, all the sights, all the life of fear."

 

[Saeltari]

I'm assuming the beginning was "I AM BORN"?

non, non, non. "In the beginning..."

 

[Saeltari]

"That's all folks!"

 

[j d worthington]

"That's all folks!"

Beginning: "Be vewy, vewy qwiet. I'm out hunting for wabbits."

Yes?

 

[StarShipSofa]

you could just sat - The END!

 

[j d worthington]

you could just sat - The END!

Hmmm. I think it's been used before. Can't remember where though....

 

[Nesacat]

These come from Alice Hoffman's Ice Queen, which I'd read recently. It's a retelling of sorts of the fairy tale of the Snow Queen and it weaves in many other old fairy tales. It's one of the most lyrical, flowing books I've read. The words run like a river from page to page and you hardly notice the hours passing.

Beginning:
Be careful hat you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes re Brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come back to haunt you. I've made far too many wishes in my lifetime, the first when I was eight years old. Not the sort of wish for ice cream or a party dress or long blonde hair; no. The other sort, the kind that rattles your bones, then sits in the back of your throat, a greedy red toad that chokes you until you say it aloud. The kind that could change your life in an instant, before you have time to wish you could take it back.

The end:
This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you're living, even here in New Jersey. Even for someone like me. You'd laugh to know how long it's taken me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you're not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don't mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I know what I'm seeing is the ever after. I hope it's you.

 

[j d worthington]

Oh, indeed, that is lovely. Definitely going to have to put that on my TBRS list ... very soon indeed. You're right. The flow there is very nice, and quiet yet poignant.

 

[stirdgit]

I have two favorites:

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Dune - Frank Herbert

I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

[carrie221]

Nesacat that is beautiful that is definitly going on my to read list right away.

My favorite ending from a book is The 10th Kingdom by Kathryn Wesley:

She leaned her head against his shoulder. Happily Ever After wasn't a prediction. She had learned in her journey through the Nine Kingdoms that Happily Ever After was really something else.

If she lived every day with all her heart, then she would be Happily Ever After. She stared at the park around her. Wolf was warm against her and so solid. Wolves mated for life. And most of the time, so did humans. She placed a hand over her belly, and her ring sang softly.

This was truly a magical place. She just hadn't realized how magical until now.

 

[j d worthington]

That, too, is a lovely ending.

One of my own favorites is from Lord Dunsany's "The Hoard of the Gibbelins", in his A Dreamer's Tales:

"The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a seperate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have been known to scatter rubies about, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again."

and the ending?

"He was in the emerald cellar. There was no light in the lefty vault above him, but, diving through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor all rough with emeralds, and open coffers full of them. By a faint ray of the moon he saw that the water was green with them, and, easily filling a satchel, he rose again to the surface; and there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall -- and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending."

 

[Nesacat]

I just finished Justin Marozzi's Tamerlane. I've always been fascinated by the man, even by his name. And this book is particularly well-written. A sweeping, historical saga and puuls the reader right into the world of the Tamerlane and the city of Samarkhand.

Beginning:
At around 10 o'clock on the morning of 28 July 1402, from a patch of raised ground high above the valley, the elderly emperor surveyed his army. It was a vast body of men, spreading over Chibukabad plain, north-east of Ankara, like a dark and terrible stain. Through the glinting sunlight the ordered lines of mounted archers stretched before him until they were lost in the shimmering blaze, each man waiting for the signal to join battle. There were two hundred thousand professional soldiers drawn from the farthest reaches of his empire, from Armenia to Afhganistan, Samarkhand to Siberia. Their confidence was high, their discipline forged in the fire of many battles. They had never known defeat.

Ending:
Temur's burial place was a simple slab of carved stone engraved with Koranic inscriptions. After the pomp and colour of the mausoleum above, the drab, dark chamber was a sombre sight. This was the grave of the man who had blazed across Asia like a comet across the heavens. For a few years his descendants had watched over the glowing embers falling through the sky until the Temurid empire and dynasty had crashed to earth, extinguished altogether. In the West Temur has been but forgotten. Those who know his name perhaps remember the fire and brimstone of Marlowe's play bout a tyrant who styled himself 'the Scourge and Wrath of God/The only fear and terror of the world.' But to all but a few, the greatest Islamic empire-builder in history, the man who joined Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan in the trio of the world's greatest conquerors, remains little more than that: a name. The city he had built so brilliantly and decorated so lovingly, once the envy of the world, lies in a neglected southern outpost of the old Soviet empire.

 

[Rosemary]

'I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place - then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement - and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

Charles Dickens - A Tale Of Two Cities.

I have always found the ending of this story somehow inspiring.

 

[j d worthington]

Yet another Dunsany, from "The Highwayman", in The Sword of Welleran:

"Tom o' the Roads had ridden his last ride, and was now alone in the night. From where he was, a man might see the white recumbent sheep and the black outline of the lonely down, and the grey line of the farther and lonelier downs beyond them; or in hollows far below him, out of the pitiless wind, he might see the grey smoke of hamlets arising from black valleys. But all alike was black to the eyes of Tom, and all the sounds were silence in his ears; only his soul struggled to slip from the iron chains and to pass southwards into Paradise. And the wind blew and blew.

"For Tom to-night had nought but the wind to ride; they had taken his true black horse on the day when the took from him the green fields and the sky, men's voices and the laughter of women, and had left him alone with chains about his neck to swing in the wind for ever. And the wind blew and blew.

"But the soul of Tom o' the Roads was nipped by the cruel chains, and whenever it struggled to escape it was beaten backwards in the iron collar by teh wind that blows from Paradise from the south. And swinging there by the neck, there fell away old sneers from off his lips, and scoffs that he had long since scoffed at God fell from his tonue, and there rotted old bad deeds that were evil; and they all fell to the ground and grew there in pallid rings and clusters. And when these ill things had all fallen away, Tom's soul was clean again, as his early love had found it, a long while since in spring; and it swung up there in the wind with the bones of Tom, and with his old torn coat and rusty chains.

"And the wind blew and blew."

the ending:

"... Then these three, that had robbed the Law of its due and proper victim, still sinned on for what was still their friend, and levered out the marble slabs from the sacred sepulchre of Paul, Archbishop of Alois and Vayence. And from it they took the very bones of the Archbishop himself, and carrid them away to the eager grave that they had left, and put them in and shovelled back the earth. But all that lay on the ladder they placed, with a few tears, within the great white sepulchre under the Cross of Christ, and put back the marble slabs.

"Thence the soul of Tom, arising hallowed out of sacred ground, went at dawn down the valley, and, lingering a little about his mother's cottage and old haunts of childhood, passed on and came to the wide lands beyond the clustered homesteads. There, there met with it all the kindly thoughts that the soul of Tom had ever had, and they flew and sang beside it all the way southwards, until at last, with singing all about it, it came to Paradise.

"But Will and Joe and the gypsy Puglioni went back to their gin, and robbed and cheated again in the tavern of foul repute, and knew not that in their sinful lives they had sinned one sin at which the Angels smiled."

 

[j d worthington]

And another from Lovecraft, "The Quest of Iranon":

"Into the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the mountain Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men of Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and fortune. So the youth answered:

"'I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in th far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotos-buds.'"

the ending:

"And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world."

 

[Nesacat]

'I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place - then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement - and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

Charles Dickens - A Tale Of Two Cities.

I have always found the ending of this story somehow inspiring.

That is a lovely piece of prose Rosie ... thank you for reminding me. It is very hopeful indeed.

 

[Nesacat]

That, too, is a lovely ending.

One of my own favorites is from Lord Dunsany's "The Hoard of the Gibbelins", in his A Dreamer's Tales:

and the ending?

Goodness I loved this one ... the whole time I was reading I was trying to tell the guy not to be so stupid and to just leave ... now. He didn't listen.

 

[YOSSARIAN]

This beginning may be out of place here. The passage is not from a book or a short story. It is the first passage of the Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Which leads to the best ending paragraph of any book:

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding. O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

 

[j d worthington]

I think the thread was intended to have beginnings and endings from the same piece in the same post, but what the heck. These are both wonderful choices. And, yes, that ending, first time I read that book, gave me nightmares for weeks....

 

[Nesacat]

Ummm ... I think I shall go with being flexible and allowing beginnings and endings from different books since we often find ourselves liking the one bur not necessarily the other.

Indeed Yossarian that is a very good beginning and an awfuly scary ending in comparison. The book truly frightened me when I first read it and it still does.