Unfinished

“There are things that cannot ever be finished. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are trying to emerge, they are testing the ground of reality; can it hold them? And they quickly withdraw, afraid they will lose their integrity in an imperfect execution.”

- Bruno Schulz, The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass(1937). Schultz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942 as he walked home with a loaf of bread.

I rediscovered this quote while looking through folders of my unpublished and mostly unfinished drafts for short stories, novels, travelogues, essays and fantastic tales written over the past thirty years. I included a few of the stories in Here, Everything Is Dreaming and Mysterious Realities.

As I get older, I am uneasily aware that I have left my best work in many genres unfinished, millions of words the world is unlikely to see.

Perhaps to convince myself that it’s necessary or even desirable to leave some creative projects unfinished. I recorded this quote under the lines from Bruno Schultz:

“In the palaces of old, the requirement was that one building was always left unfinished.”

- Yoshida No Kaneyoshi (1283-1350), Japanese monk

Then I recalled that Rodin chose to leave many of his sculptures unfinished, saying that his intention was to leave room for the imagination. This worked magnificently with his “Hand of God”, with its bold suggestion that the hand of the scultptor is the hand of the Creator.

Photo: Rodin’s “Hand of God”. We see the inchoate figures of Adam and Eve cradled in the Creator’s hand. Rodin said the composition is an homage to his master Michelangelo, whose unfinished figures bursting out of rough stone symbolize the process of artistic creation. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.