How freakish has the warm weather been in Maine this fall? This freakish: We had white pelicans off Spruce Head on Friday. Pelicans are rarely spotted north of the Carolinas.
100 Best Last Lines
Matt Yglesias, thinks the best last line from a novel comes from The Great Gatsby:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I agree with him to some extent. But there are some tough choices here. Beckett's brilliant last line in Waiting for Godot has an epigraphic quality that doesn't necessarily mean that it works from a dramatic standpoint; it's more a summation of the play's philosophy than the inevitable emotional beat that concludes its action (or inaction, as the case may be).
As a perpetual Hemingway apologist—put down those lurid biographies and read the damn books, people!—I'm always going to defend the pitch-perfect ending of The Sun Also Rises:
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
For what it's worth, I don't think it's fair to include in this list (aren't we discussing novels here?) the best last line of any short story ever written, "The Dead," by James Joyce:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
(A list of the best last lines of short stories is a problem I'd love to grapple with. Off hand, I can think of a bunch to include: "My Mortal Enemy," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," any number by Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. What am I missing? I'm not reading a lot of contemporary short stories these days so I freely confess my ignorance.)
In reading the novel list I was taken aback by how many last lines have entered our collective consciousness via Bartlett's quotations (e.g. A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol). Stripped of their contexts, these famous quotes become blunted and troublesome. Because of their ubiquity, we can no longer assess them as pure literary constructs; we can't appreciate the functions they were meant to serve within their respective novels.
All in all, though, I'd have to say that skimming these last lines provoked in me a desire to go back and reread books I haven't fingered since college. Absalom, Absalom! here I come.
UPDATE: OK. I'm not going to chicken out here. I have great affection for a lot of these enders as works of genius (1984, As I Lay Dying, Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness), but if forced to pick, my own choice would come down to Gatsby or Ulysses. Frankly, Joyce's polyglot masterwork is not something I find myself reaching for regularly, but the novel ends exactly where it has to end. It utterly fulfills its author's intention. One of the ways you know a book is a masterpiece is when you realize at the conclusion that there was no other possible way this story could have ended. Bloom wins!
The Essence of Small Town Maine
This is from the Hallowell police blotter in the Capital Weekly newspaper:
On Nov. 30, a man called police to inform them that his cat had given birth. The caller said he had no idea how the cat got pregnant.
Hunting Wolves
We don't have wolves in Maine, but we do have an increasing number of large eastern coyotes that have begun to reoccupy the environmental niche once filled here by wolves. Like wolves in the Mountain West, these coyotes are predators that prey upon the economic assets of farmers (which is a jargonish way of referring to animals like sheep and goats) and compete with sportsmen for game. Maine has a year-round open season on coyotes, meaning that a licensed hunter can pursue them every day or night if he or she wishes, killing as many as possible. Despite this arrangement, coyotes continue to thrive here. Their numbers may even be increasing.
It turns out that managing predator populations is something of a voodoo science unless you resort, as our ancestors did, to outright extermination. I'm sure there are deer hunters in Maine that would love to return to those hoary days of yore when the state paid a bounty on coyote hides, and it's clear that there are a lot of people out west who feel the same about gray wolves. Hence the recent wolf hunts in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. According to the New York Times today the results have been mixed, if one's definition of success is meeting a quota on animals killed. If I lived in the Northern Rockies, I would support a moratorium on wolf hunts while scientists studied ways to ensure that a reduced wolf population remain genetically strong, but I also believe that, as long as humans and wild animals occupy the same landscapes, hunting and trapping remain the most effective tools for creating eco-systems that aren't terrifically unbalanced. That said, I personally have no more desire to shoot a wolf — or a coyote — than I do a German shepherd.
Find a Park
Call it chauvinism, but I've always been a fan of L.L. Bean. One reason is the generous discount it gives Registered Maine Guides. Another is this cool feature on the Bean Web site. You can literally search the world for parks according to the sort of activity that interests you (from hiking to big game hunting). I just searched Scandinavia for places to fish and discovered Urho Kekkonen National Park in Finland, where 20,000 reindeer graze the windswept tundra. I have no clue whether the fishing is any good in the Finnish part of Lapland, but the thought of all those caribou roaming around under the Northern Lights brought a smile to my face.