Don't know how much of my seeming inability to finish or consummate much of anything is down to my finding the beginnings and middles of books so much better than the endings. This is true of philosophy books particularly which tend to start strong, get overly involved, then either peter out or build to a falsely bang up finish (see Hegel). The same is true to a lesser extent of more popular varieties of fiction of course, feeding my interest in serial works & seriality generally, the heavy use of recapitulation in Zelazny's Amber books, the recurrence of the stock situation in Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc. My interests in thought as process or activity & in troubleshooting complex systems are down to this same basic reaction/impulse, I think.

Really wanted to end that quote from 'Inferno' I put up the other day one stanza earlier, but for some reason felt I needed to let Dante tell the lies he felt the need to (& I'm quite sure he knew as well as I do that they are lies, utter bullshit) to get to his period. The dark wood is where the action is.

So, little girl, nice hood, where you headed?