They are in the air around me today, I guess. Tworivers and I had a nice conversation this late afternoon about The Great Gatsby, and I, of course, had to quote its last line, which is one of the Best Last Lines Ever: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Oh My.
I love that book, and I love that line. I memorized it I don’t know how long ago, and can’t remember doing it. I guess I just read it over and over because why wouldn’t I?
A good last line is a sigh, a gift, a segue that carries you from the book itself into your own life changed. You can’t beat a good last line.
Here’s another one, a few of them really, from Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe: “People changed other people’s lives every day of the year. There was no call to make such a fuss about it.”
(Don’t worry, tworivers, if you haven’t read that book yet. This won’t spoil a thing.)
And from Harper Lee’s classic: “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
That line made me want to cry when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird in the 9th grade. I didn’t understand why it made me want to cry; it just did. But that’s saying something, too, isn’t it? It’s saying that just there Lee succeeded in a novel to communicate beyond language. I didn’t grasp the underlying denotation of that sentence, but it moved me anyway, like music. Now That’s Good Writing.
Tonight I finished reading E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to the children. It’s the third read for me since I’ve been a mother: I read it to William when he was four, to both boys when one was four and the other six, and now to all three of them at four, six, and eight. What a beautiful book that is! White makes magic of a barnyard and three generally disliked figures– a pig, a rat, and a spider. He is graphically honest about the smell of manure, the nature of selfishness, and the ugly gastronomic tendencies of his characters. But at the same time he creates a friendship that is above all things honest and deeply loving.
For the first time tonight I managed to read the last paragraph without a constricted throat and tears welling. Who do you think White was thinking of when he penned these words, or was Charlotte just as real to him as he has made her be for me?
“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
