I'm glad you did this. It so often comes down to semantics, doesn't it? Like how I'm tempted to push back with something about how satisfaction is antithetical to nihilism.
At heart, though, we probably disagree about a few fundamentals of reality. I don't (or maybe I just refuse to?) believe that a person's story ends with death. But I also don't believe that this somehow cheapens or trivializes one single moment of anyone's life, anymore than the last chapter of a book robs any meaning from the first.
Yours in thinking, indeed. I read your essay and it reminds me how little I think about these deep things and how interesting it is when you provoke me to do it! I'll need to read this essay again, I think! It also makes me so damn eager to read the story and meet the characters you have been building.
I'm glad you did this. It so often comes down to semantics, doesn't it? Like how I'm tempted to push back with something about how satisfaction is antithetical to nihilism.
At heart, though, we probably disagree about a few fundamentals of reality. I don't (or maybe I just refuse to?) believe that a person's story ends with death. But I also don't believe that this somehow cheapens or trivializes one single moment of anyone's life, anymore than the last chapter of a book robs any meaning from the first.
Yours in thinking, indeed. I read your essay and it reminds me how little I think about these deep things and how interesting it is when you provoke me to do it! I'll need to read this essay again, I think! It also makes me so damn eager to read the story and meet the characters you have been building.
I like nihilistic endings a lot when well done. Some of the Japanese erotic-grotesque novels and films I consume are pretty nihilistic.
I like a story with a happy ending, too, if well done.
I don't think one kind of ending is better or worse but they work depending on execution, genre, and theme.