“What is at the end?” the first asked, more wonder than worry in asking.
“The end of what?” the second replied. “The street? The book? The world?”
“Anything. Everything.”
And so they spoke, at first about what is known to end. Bodies stop. Clocks tick their last. Stars collapse. Civilizations fade like breath on glass. They listed these things solemnly, and then talked of endings with evidence—how the body cools, how the light leaves the eyes. How even memory is a brittle thing that eventually crumbles in the minds of others. One spoke of fossils and tombs, the other of archives and ashes. The first spoke of an aunt whose last breath was taken with eyes wide open, and the second, of a dog that ran to the end of the driveway and never returned. They nodded together. These, they agreed, are things we know end.
Then they turned to what might lie beyond, where theology begins. “At the end,” one said, “God waits, perhaps.”
“Or judges,” the other added.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” – Winston Churchill, 1942. Amidst World War II, capturing the layered nature of conclusions—how what seems like an ending may only be a turning point or transition. It resonates across political, philosophical, and even theological discussions about what “the end” really means.
They considered this: an afterlife shaped by belief, a paradise or punishment sewn from one’s deeds. Some say heaven is endless peace, others that it’s reunion. Some speak of cycles, reincarnations—of ends becoming beginnings over and over. One brought up the Book of Revelation, of trumpets and beasts and thrones. The other countered with the Quran’s gardens and rivers. They recalled teachings from temples, synagogues, cathedrals, mosques—divergent paths that all presume a final destination. Even in theology, the end isn’t really an end, but a sorting, a reckoning, or a restoration.
They moved on to philosophy, where endings are less certain. “The end,” one mused, “is the final abstraction—non-being.”
“Or perhaps it’s only a shift in perception,” the other said.
They invoked Plato and his Forms, Nietzsche and his eternal recurrence, Camus and his absurd man staring down the void. If theology seeks meaning after death, philosophy often dissects the meaning of death itself. They discussed the fear of nonexistence, the idea that life is only meaningful because it ends, and the counterpoint—that life is meaningful regardless of endings. “The end is silence,” one posited. “But silence can be full of possibility,” the other said, hopeful. The idea was not resolution, but expansion. Maybe the end is a threshold, not a terminus. Maybe it’s a concept language fails to hold.
They sat quiet for a moment, not sure who had the last word. And then one of them whispered, almost smiling:
“And on the first day;”