The End of Loneliness
Of late, there has been a quiet thought sitting at the back of my head that I haven’t completed a single book this year. One reason being most of the books I tried reading didn’t excite me as much as I thought they would, so I was obliged to drop them midway and thus began my reading slump. But during Christmas Eve, I stumbled upon ‘The End of Loneliness’ by sheer serendipity, began reading it on a whim, and it etched a mark that lingered long after I turned the final page.
‘The End of Loneliness’ by Benedict Wells is a German book about Jules Moreau and his fractured life and his pursuit through it while never losing hope. The book reminds us of a truth we often choose to ignore. We wildly overestimate the time we are going to be spending on this planet but we might never know what the future holds and that could be a tough pill to swallow. The future feels infinite—until it isn’t. And that realization is not an easy one to sit with.
The dynamics between a father and a son have always bewildered me. The grief Jules goes through after the loss of his parents during his childhood, I couldn’t even find the words to describe the emotions, the agony he goes through and how, once vivacious and fearless, Jules retreats inward, preferring to live within his memories.
There is something profoundly comforting about words. It is that they continue to exist between pages for all eternity untouched by time. Through them, characters like Jules end up being immortal. Not every story ends with a ‘they lived happily ever after’ and they never have to be because Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.