The end is near. Today something comes to an end whose end is so short that its beginning overshadows it: end of the year, beginning of the year, all in one old and repeating night.
But at some point we will celebrate, we will collide cavas and heads, we will hang on to bells and grapes, we will tell ourselves that there is a good ending and a better beginning – even though for us it is neither the end nor the Future arrives at the beginning, but what comes after, the illusion of a new start and the hope of becoming more or less different. To do this, we have to believe that an end will finally come today: something has to end.
The word fin is as blunt as any other: it comes from Latin, where it meant the end, and it was always the same. It has its strange derivatives, of course, such as “finance,” which in its French and medieval origins initially meant “paying a ransom.” Any similarity to the current meaning is not a mere coincidence – and that is why it is still referred to as “good” in English.
And there is the whole series of its dreamy opposites: endless, infinite, defining. But what matters at the end of the word is the illusion that things are over. There are some who do this: each of us, for example, or a book we read or write, or one of these blisses, or this delicious lentil stew. But we keep seeing illusory goals or real goals of illusory entities. If things didn't have a foreseeable ending, they would be unbearable. The illusion of the end appears so clear in Italian, that clumsy great-great-grandchild of Latin. There is a song from the sixties that sums it up: “Fin'a quando, amore, fin'a quando…” to say until when, love, until when, that is: when will this catastrophe end.
And then, just in case, we fill ourselves with endings and beginnings. What will change in our lives when a convention we call 2023 ends? What will be different from tomorrow, when we call it 2024? Certainly so little, if anything, but we like these false endings, they encourage us: they puff us up with the feeling that we can start over again, that there is something – that we generally don't like, that is usually ours is called life – This is the end. And then something begins. It's the oldest trick in the book.
And then we use the supposed end to set ourselves new goals. Because the best thing about the end of a word is that – like all good words – it is so ambiguous: it can be the end of something, it can be the goal of something. Therefore, he participates in one of the most flourishing sayings in Spanish today: “The end justifies the means.”
When I was younger I thought it meant tout est bien qui finit bien – what ends well is fine – that if the ending was good, the whole journey was good, but no: it means that if the Goals are good, all means will do. And since the narrator has the power to define which ends are good, he can accept very strange means. Few phrases, few ideas have ever been used to defend the worst villains.
In any case, these juggling acts are further evidence of the ambiguity of the word's ending. Why do we keep these sarcastic words that cause us doubts above all? Fortunately? For pleasure or laziness? Pure nonsense? To give us the pleasure of ever writing a word as great as Marrullería? Or simply because speaking really means saying something that the other person can understand in different ways, and then resigning yourself to listening to the other person – out of comfort, out of tiredness, out of love, out of risk? Because when you speak, you try to say something and you never know exactly what you're saying, what you're listening to?
There are degrees, there are always degrees. The ending can replace the ending, but the ending, on the other hand, is something completely different. This night, which we hope will not be final, will be the end of something, the end of nothing, the beginning of nothing. You're welcome, but thank you, thank you very much.
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