“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
Greene starts his story a year and a half after an affair has ended, when the primary remaining emotion tying the former lovers together is hatred, not love. It opens with the married man meeting his betrayer in the street. The still-married man believes the one he meets on the street to be a friend; the man, jilted by the other’s wife for yet another lover, is consumed with hatred for the husband and his wife. The husband knows nothing of the love between his wife and his former friend, nor the contempt his former friend holds for him. The woman knows nothing of this meeting, having ceased all contact with her former lover. The ex-lover knows nothing of her life in the time between.
The novel tells a love story, beginning after the love has faded, but the connections between the players are still strong. It is a story of deep intimacy and the knowledge that comes with falling in love, intertwined with the truth of how little we know the people to whom we are closest, despite believing we are intimate. By beginning with hate, Greene makes sure we remember something visceral we all know: if we can love a person, we can hate them. Often, the loving and hating ping pong across the relationship, sometimes within seconds of each other, sometimes taking whole days or weeks to cycle through. We like to think we are above hating those we love, but I don’t know anyone who is.
The best we can do, if we want to keep a relationship, is to acknowledge that hateful feelings are bound to arise, and choose to move around them, stepping lightly as those do in fields where underground landmines threaten to detonate with one wrong step. Because the hatred doesn’t mean anything, really, other than that we are deeply tied to the person and viscerally, painfully, dislike them right now and believe they are the cause of our deepest inner disappointments and upsets. The opposite of love isn’t hatred – as hatred keeps us close, keeps us fueled and ready to engage. Indifference is the real end of love, the opposite of deep connection. The not caring to such a degree that the other person’s continued existence no longer impacts our hearts and minds, asleep or awake.
I suppose no good story can be created from indifference. Who would read it? Who could muster up enough energy to care if the characters themselves no longer care? Stories – love stories, family stories, success stories, political stories, fairy tales and myths, ballads and pop music lyrics – must have the strength of being somewhere between the beginning and the end, somewhere in the messiness of a shifting narrative.
Greene’s characters vacillate between love and hatred, of themselves, their partners, even of God, bound to one another, not daring to make the clean break or live without. As long as we hate the Other, even God, Greene suggests, we live in the hope of the redemptive return, the banishment of our loneliness, the continuation of a love story rather than its final denouement.
I know people who maintain relationships long after they have supposedly ended. If only one person ends a relationship, does it really end? The tree may have fallen in the forest, but its story isn’t over. In fact, it begins another chapter, where it becomes part of the forest floor, the host for other growing things, green moss and shelf mushrooms and maybe even seedlings of other trees. Or it disintegrates, decomposes, matter released from one form in the service of another.
It’s tricky to tell, then, when a relationship ends, since perhaps the ending is different for each participant, as well as for the relationship itself. Perhaps the same is true of relationship beginnings. We expect a relationship to begin at the beginning, and then move on. But no relationship begins at the beginning, of boy meets girl. Because Boy has a beginning that predates the meeting; Girl does not spring into being the moment Boy acknowledges her. Each has begun long ago, perhaps beginning and ending several times before the moment the current relationship will start. Their parents, too, have begun before them; the genetic code and cultural memories may go back hundreds of years.
To tell the story of my current love, I have to choose the beginning. Whatever moment I choose will determine the arc of the story. If I choose to begin the story yesterday, it will include moments of weariness, of long hours and mundane household chores and falling asleep after a lifeless hug and kiss, exhaustion replacing every vibrant fiber in our bodies with dead air. If I begin it just 24 hours before, the narrative shifts, revealing playfulness and sarcastic banter, lingering bedtime kisses slow enough to taste one another. Yet another beginning, say, the day we met, creates a story about excitement of the senses, the quickening of pulses, the amazement of encountering intellect and body, form and function, that jolted us both awake and alive. For him, our meeting formed the beginning of a redemption tale; for me, a resurrection story.
Yet our story begins well before even this point. There is the story before the story, the relationships that began and ended before there was an “us” – our separate loves and losses, disappointments and dreams. Two people, two stories inhabit one relationship. No wonder two feelings can inhabit one moment. There is the day, 14 years apart, we each moved to the same city, placing our characters in a similar setting. There is the day I arrived in the city before this city. Back and back we can go, until ultimately his story begins with his parents, who began before him, reaching back and back to pasts that resemble nothing of my ancestors’ lives. I know so little about the man I am with; in turn, he knows only fragments of my thoughts and experiences. Collectively, we have access to mere moments of each other’s consciousness. We are awake and alive and sentient outside of each other’s presence/purview far more than we are in it. The story is one of not knowing, but thinking we know. Love, Greene might be saying, requires far less “knowing” than we imagine.
My story has no beginning or end; or, more truthfully, my story has multiple beginnings and endings. If I don’t begin at my beginning, but predate even that, my story can be told from any possible point in time, even several generations back. I’m not just the granddaughter with memories of my grandparents, but with living genetic heritage from their grandparents, and theirs before. Eye and skin color, the shape of my nose, the curl in my hair, my laugh – these began before me and will live on after me, although maybe not the skin color, as my only heir has his father’s skin coloring, a lovely rich hue that almost clashes with my fair pinkness. My ending may not have one finite point, either. Who knows how my story will end, or how many more beginnings and endings await me.
In fact, my ending will be like that fallen tree, as I have become the host organism for my son’s separate life. Surely, then, his story has begun and continues, based only in part on the nourishment and structure my limbs and trunk have provided. His story – the story he knows of himself – begins before his consciousness can recall. His conception, the miscarriage that preceded my pregnancy with him, the day I looked in his Father’s eyes and imagined having this man’s child, the moment years prior when I imagined that one day, far in the future, I would have a child. My son’s story, begun before my own conscious memories, will continue long after I am gone.