So anticipation: it’s like that passage from Bouvard & Pecuchet that I’ve only read about, or maybe Sentimental Education, of looking forward for a week or two to a moment about to come, but not pre-hashing it unnecessarily but just knowing that happiness of whatever variety is ahead and also here now.

So by now, it is over, and tomorrow it will also be over, but I have gotten off the series finale bandwagon.

I think the last time that I watched a series finale live was probably Seinfeld in 1998. The difference, though, between that sort of thing and the other event finales is that for Seinfeld or M*A*S*H, it’s the sort of situational comedical thing that you grew up with, in and out, and not with some overarching, interlocking plot of the X-Files mythology type. And though my logic for Mondays have, for the past five or so years, been constrained–giving up teaching, kyudo, and all manner of other things–it’s more than okay that my enjoyment of the last episode will not be live. The other thing is that with the advance of distribution technologies, including DVD and streaming online, it’s easier to be out of synch, and lagging, and much less essential to be live. That at least is the plan for tomorrow night, which may end up stretching to multiple Sundays. So be it!

So my Tolstoyan riff of the day goes something like this.

Beginnings are all alike. With headiness and anticipation, and a yearning for what has not yet come to pass, beginnings point to the future. Hope and desire are the nouns and verbs of beginnings. You listen and leave some things still unsaid.

Middles vary and already anticipate the precipice though with different horizons and forms of laziness and thrift. What was said is unsaid, and unsaid said. Other things which were once said are taken un-said.

Ends come, of course, with both bangs and whimpers, but also silences, ignorances, and other such denials and abnegations. But it is natural, for ends bring new beginnings.

You can guess where I am.