At my father’s funeral, a mere 40 years ago, I made a slightly embarrassing error in judgment. (Why should that day have been any different?)
At the conclusion of the graveside prayer service, as we mourners were starting to file back to our cars, the black-suited officiant from the funeral home extended his right hand to me, the clueless teenage son of the deceased. I shook it. And then he kept his right hand extended. I realized he had not meant to shake my hand at all but was only asking me to return to him the prayer booklet he had distributed. So, I turned in my prayer booklet. The time for condolences had ended, and we were being moved along.
As much as any of the more solemn moments of that day, that bit of awkwardness at the graveside remains for me somehow conclusive, a full stop to that very bad time. It was as if my father’s soul could not sail off to eternal rest until we, his loved ones, had returned our prayer books, in good condition. Only then would it be finished. Go in peace.
In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, the heroine Ruthie posits “a law of completion,” an eschatology that stipulates “that everything must finally be made comprehensible.” In Ruthie’s utopia, all that is inscrutable will reveal its substance and meaning at the end. Maybe we get to meet up with our parents again; maybe you are reunited with the beagle who helped you survive high school. Maybe — dare we hope? — all the messes we have made of our lives will come to make sense. “What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” Ruthie asks.
The virtues of completion are drummed into us early. Finish your dinner, finish what you start, finish your homework before you even think about going outside to play.
According to the Buddha, there are two great errors: not starting and not finishing. But hasn’t the second always been the more shameful? The nonstarter at least reserves for himself the comforting delusion that he easily could have done the job if he had wanted to do it. But to not finish is an admission of defeat, a surrender to whatever obstacles or self-sabotage loomed between you and the finish line. Even if you tell yourself that you quit because you decided your project wasn’t worth your effort, well then, you were an idiot even to have started. Failure lurks in every direction.
An (incomplete) list of things I have left unfinished: The shop-class spice rack I was supposed to make for Mother’s Day when I was 12. The novel I tried to write when I was 13. My guitar lessons. My piano lessons. My Italian lessons. The novel I tried to write when I was a sophomore in college. My minor in world history. A bracelet I tried to make for my first postgraduation girlfriend. (She dumped me first.) The novel I tried to write after I left my first job. Assembly of a futon purchased from IKEA in 1998. (My wife had to finish it.) At least three attempted readings of Proust.
Since childhood I have made a habit of giving up on tasks that don’t come easily to me. This is an unfortunate tendency, as very few things come easily to me. It took me a ridiculously long time to learn to swim as a child, mainly because I didn’t like the idea of appearing, in public, not to know how to swim. Santella’s First Law: It is very difficult to learn to do any particular thing if you don’t want anyone to know that you can’t do that thing.
Nor is my persistence what it should be. When I was in grade school, I somehow convinced my parents that I wanted to build a birdhouse. I can’t imagine what made me want to do this, as I had no interest in either birds or building. But my father took me to a hobby shop where he bought me a DIY birdhouse kit that, we were promised, would be so easy to assemble that even a fool couldn’t fail. It was shortly after I tried to attach a piece of the roof where the flooring was supposed to be that I gave up on the project. A few weeks later, after he tired of seeing the pieces of the would-be birdhouse cluttering his workbench, my father quietly finished building the thing. He hung it on a branch of our big backyard elm, and neither of us ever said a thing about the matter. For all I know, it’s still hanging there, having provided shelter for generations of feathered creatures.
That episode is an unending source of shame for me. What Bertrand Russell called, as far back as 1932, “our cult of efficiency” leaves no place for tasks unaccomplished. Quitting is contemptible; waiting is weak; delaying, a waste of time. Getting things done keeps the world humming, keeps the money flowing. And the enterprising efficiency revered in the workplace becomes the standard for our personal lives, too. Psychologists refer to “completion anxiety,” a state triggered by pressure to do a job well and the worry over what will happen if you fail. Even your single-minded focus on the finish line can bring you to a shuddering halt.
I know readers who don’t like to leave novels unfinished, no matter how big a stinker the book is. Once begun, they believe, a novel must be read to completion. I think this is a silly attitude about reading novels, especially since so many of them are so depressingly lousy. But in other activities, persistence is a virtue. I would not, for example, want my doctor to quit halfway through my open-heart surgery just because he is finding me not-so-interesting.
The Romantic poets, with their love of fragments and ruins, were always equating the unfinished with the authentic, the spontaneous. Masterful though unfinished works like Mozart’s Requiem or Gaudí’s Sagrada Família demand our attention, not despite their incompleteness, but because of it. Being finished can, in a similar way, suggest overrefinement to the point of damage. “I’m sorry I ever sent her to finishing school,” the salty, wealthy widow in To Catch A Thief says of her spoiled-brat daughter. “I think they finished her there.”
When we talk about something being finished, we may mean the thing is satisfyingly complete, polished, ready for its closeup. Alternatively, we may mean it is exhausted, done, spent. If you don’t examine them too closely, the two senses can seem almost in opposition to each other — one positive, one pejorative. But they are so closely related that they may describe the same thing. Because in completing the thing, we also necessarily drain it of its potential. It stops becoming. It is finished.
Finish has its roots in the Latin finis, denoting a border, boundary or limit, as in a finish line or deadline. As a writer, I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines. I would love to meet my deadlines, but I hate doing the work necessary to make that happen. My progress on this essay, for example, has stalled several times. You (or my editors) might ask: Why don’t you just buckle down and finish your work?
The usual excuses — distractions, indecision — apply here. But in many cases, we (read I) deploy incompletion as a bulwark against failure. I find something irresistibly attractive about the work in progress, that sense of endless possibility. As long as an idea in my head remains in formation, the procrastinator thinks, it might yet turn out to be brilliant. Better to let it stay in that incomplete state than to finish it and prove otherwise. The work in progress may still aspire to perfection. As soon as it is finished, it becomes another well-meaning but failed effort by another imperfect creator.
My childhood friends and I were, for a while there, a little obsessed with death and the afterlife. I found the fact that I would die someday completely outrageous. It seemed to me a glitch in the system, something that should be corrected. Wasn’t there something that could be done about this? Someone who could be contacted? A petition that could be circulated?
Even more disturbing was what might happen after death. My friends and I compared notes on our understanding of Hell, and most of us agreed that it would involve rats and darkness. Which is to say, it would be something like the New York City subway system.
Eternity, as a concept, also proved troubling. Thinking about it, trying to understand it, would keep me up some nights. It was incomprehensible, the never-ending-ness of it. Trying to imagine it induced a kind of vertigo. Eternal life had been pitched to us as a kind of reward for being good — like when we won half-price White Sox tickets for perfect attendance in grade school. But eternal life — like the White Sox, I suppose — could scare the crap out of you.
The afterlife, after all, is religion’s big draw, its value-added. But not everyone is sold. Some attach themselves so fiercely to this life that they have no interest in the next. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus tries to console the spirit of Achilles by reminding him that he has won eternal reward, Achilles says he’d rather not, thank you all the same. “Do not try to persuade me to make light of death, Odysseus. I should choose, if I could live on earth, to serve as the bondsman of another . . . rather than be lord of all the dead, who are no more.”
Achilles had sniffed out the problem with eternal life — that it can only be had in exchange for the life we have here. Is that a trade we can feel good about? It’s like an existential version of Let’s Make a Deal. You can’t help but worry that Monty Hall has some very nasty surprise waiting for you behind Curtain Number Two.
Their writhing shapes imply the struggle of the artist to bring forth his work. By making an aesthetic choice of their unfinishedness, they call attention to the artist’s humanity and imperfection. Completion belongs only to the divine.
When the Milanese duke Ludovico Sforza commissioned an equestrian statue from Leonardo da Vinci in 1482, Leonardo did what he usually did. He stalled. Sforza’s horse was meant to be the largest equestrian statue in the world, but also an extraordinarily dynamic one, including not just the rearing animal, but the figure of a fallen soldier beneath it. Leonardo, typically, was meticulous in his preparations. Maybe too meticulous. He conducted anatomical studies of horses, then wrote a treatise on the topic. He worked out the considerable engineering challenges of casting such an enormous work, devising a system of iron braces to bolster the statue. But then he just kept stalling.
Leonardo was one of history’s great polymaths; a genius who did important work in art and anatomy, astronomy and engineering. But in many ways, he was also your typical freelancer. He hated saying no to new assignments, was always overpromising, had a lot of trouble with deadlines. Delay was, for Leonardo, standard operating procedure. He had a head full of ideas but was constantly harried by the demands of noble snobs wanting portraits. He became famous for making big plans and never getting around to realizing them. Now we are amazed at his achievements, but in his time, his patrons mostly wanted to know when he would finally finish the work he had promised.
His first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, blamed the problem on Leonardo’s perfectionism. “He began many things, [but] it appeared to him that the hand was not able to attain the perfection of art in executing the things which he imagined,” Vasari wrote. Pope Leo X was blunter: “This man will accomplish nothing.”
The problem of casting Sforza’s horse may have stymied Leonardo; his rival Michelangelo liked to taunt him about his lack of progress on the statue. As it turned out, Leonardo never would complete it. With a French invasion force threatening, the Milanese in 1493 decided they would need Leonardo’s bronze to make cannons for defense of the city. The final insult came when the French finally advanced into Milan. Their archers are said to have used Leonardo’s clay model of the statue for target practice.
Leonardo’s unfinished works could often be explained by circumstances like war with France or lack of funds. But it was during his time that artists began creating intentionally unfinished works. Michelangelo’s Prisoners, with its twisted figures not fully carved from their marble blocks, is an example of Renaissance non finito in sculpture — a whole aesthetic of the incomplete, the unresolved, the open-ended. The figures seem to be suspended in the process of emerging from stone. Their writhing shapes imply the struggle of the artist to bring forth his work. By making an aesthetic choice of their unfinishedness, they call attention to the artist’s humanity and imperfection. Completion belongs only to the divine.
The most powerful memory of my childhood is of the Sunday-night dread that followed a weekend of ignoring my homework. My teachers would not have had any use for my ideas about unfinishedness as an aesthetic choice. The point of the homework wasn’t to help me master the putative subject. The point was to teach me to finish things. But what’s so great about completion? The possibility of giving up is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going.
I once had a friend who liked to remind me that life was meant to be lived to its fullest because “this ain’t no dress rehearsal.” But what if life is something like a dress rehearsal? This is approximately what Friedrich Nietzsche proposed in his 1882 work, The Gay Science: What if you had to live your life over and over again, every day repeated for all eternity? “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth?” Nietzsche asked. Or, might there might be one joyous, pure moment in our lives whose reliving would make all the rest worthwhile?
Contra my advice-giving friend, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence prods us to live the best possible life — not because it’s the only one we’ll get, but because we may have to live it over and over.
Compare this notion with that other great philosophical treatise, the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. As in Nietzsche’s thought experiment, Murray’s depressed, sardonic weatherman, Phil Connors, is granted a farcical immortality, fated to repeat the title day over and over. Except that Phil retains agency. He can act differently each day, and he can change. Instead of turning out exactly the same, Nietzsche-style, each of Phil’s days, because of his various choices, turns out slightly different from its predecessor. Each becomes a simulacrum of the day before, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that eventually doesn’t resemble the original at all. So Phil incrementally, tortuously, takes control of his fate, becoming more highly developed and lovable, and mastering ice sculpting along the way.
Phil is an absurd hero. Snared in his private, hellish Groundhog Day — the day when we are supposed to learn whether things might get a little better or remain drearily the same — he stands in for anyone who has ever felt trapped in his own behaviors, addictions, self-sabotage. Phil at least has the advantage of immortality, an unlimited store of time to work out his escape.
For us, though, the clock is always ticking.
My childhood sometimes plays in my memory like an endless series of doctor’s visits — not because I was a sickly kid, but because every team I tried out for, every school trip I went on, every camp I attended, seemed to require an updated physical.
What I remember most about these medical examinations (other than the mortifying moment when I was told to drop my pants and cough) was the way they ended. My father would hand the doctor a $20 bill in payment, which the doctor would place in a cigar box in one of the drawers of his desk. Then they’d shake hands. That’s how it was done in those long-ago times.
Our doctor’s office was in the medical building adjacent to the hospital where my father would, years later, die. I suppose that was one of the many reasons why it was so disturbing to see him in his hospital room: I was seeing him for the first time as a patient, as someone in need of care. To be a patient is to be impatient — frustrated by all the waiting, yes, but also by the loss of agency, the submission to someone else’s regimen of care. So all health is a form of postponement. Its object is to delay a natural and inevitable event — namely, death.
The ars moriendi of the late Middle Ages, created to help believers achieve a “good death,” advised them to imagine their own final hours, in as much detail as they could manage, to prepare them for the real thing. Is it a little odd that in 14th- and 15th-century Europe, with bodies piling up in the wake of the Black Death, plague and pretty much constant warfare, believers had to be urged to confront their inescapable mortality? And is it even weirder that, as a child raised in the ultrahygienic, ridiculously privileged United States of the late 20th century, I felt compelled to think about a death that I had no reason to expect any time soon?
I am now almost the same age my father was when he died, an age where one might reasonably expect to be finished, or just about finished, and yet I think of myself as utterly unfinished. Sometimes I think I’ve barely started. I live like I have all the time in the world — which, for those banking on eternal bliss, may be literally true.
It all depends on what you think it means to be finished. Or maybe you would argue that we are never really finished; that what some think of as our end is just a kind of beginning. It is possible that in my obsessions about oblivion, I really am making too much of nothing.
So, like Marilyn Robinson’s characters, I have these fragments: Birdhouses, doctor’s visits, condolences. But I don’t believe in the need for knitting-up. I envy believers like Robinson their laws of completion. But I find something presumptuous, almost blasphemous, about expecting our fragments “to be knit up finally.” I’m more at home with Herman Melville’s orison from the “Cetology” chapter of Moby-Dick: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught.”
Fittingly, “Cetology,” with its litany of everything you never wanted to know about whales, as if Ishmael had turned into Cliff from Cheers, is probably where most readers give up on this famously unfinishable book. This is where they leave it “standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.”
So here’s to the incomplete; here’s to the “draughts.” I pray a prayer like Melville’s — against finishing, and for the same favor I ask of my editors: More days, as many of them as I can get. Keep them coming, non finito, forever.
Andrew Santella is author of Soon: An Overdue History of Procrastination and a frequent contributor to this magazine.