I felt emptied this weekend when finishing Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale). I always feel this way at the end of something incredible.

The last-past blues: that horrible, narrowing dread which signals the finitude of a book’s world, the cessation of a voyage, the reentry into everyday life.

I renounce it.

I grind my teeth and refusenik the ending with a pen. Sometimes I dash off a review, but mostly I save it for the room of the notebook, the particular room of endings where last lines and final images are collected, treasured, preserved—and revisited as thresholds for reentry.

Backwards can be a way into things. I thought of this when reading Robert Walser this weekend, and reconsidering The Walk in light of one of my favorite book-musers, Joseph Schreiber, who summarizes the feel and texture so well:

The narrator is a writer and a self-styled flâneur whose environment is not the bustling metropolis, but a semi-rural/semi-suburban setting featuring bucolic scenery and peopled with eccentric characters. The novella opens with our hero leaving the gloomy isolation of his daily confrontation with the empty page, to set off on a series of errands. He is in a jaunty, positive mood. It’s evident that being out on the street is where he feels most free, confident, and at ease. Opinionated, observant, and self-conscious, the narrative that unfolds is marked by an excessive chattiness. Whether he is addressing the reader or someone he encounters, a certain manic energy drives the perambulator’s account….

The walk, itself, is deeply significant for Walser—who acknowledges the important of walking to his own writing. The walk is where one collects the details which turn into words—the impressions which become images, the clothing which signals social status, the world.

Maira Kalman’s “Thoughts on Robert Walser” (included in New Directions’ Christine Burgin series-version of Microscripts) is an ending that feels like a beginning, or a bouquet which gathers Walser without burying him, without marking a grave.

It is not wrong to begin without knowing where one is going.

Many of us follow the footprints which fascinate us into the forest of impossible things and emerge with our own story—a story that doesn’t replicate the feet which led us there.

What do I mean by any of this?

How is this connected?

What is connection when it feels most palpable with the dead?

“Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand.

This is second-to-last line of Robert Walser’s The Walk (translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton).

But it is also the beginning of an essay or a story. The flowers fell on a flagstone, the place where he asked me to meet him. His grandfather’s name chiseled across the top. And a new message written in black Sharpie which the rain had mostly washed-off.

My endings notebook is filled with these, and for me, they are writing prompts. The endings are the best beginnings, the most luscious counterpoints already keyed on the metronome, ready to be subverted, destabilized, stirred into stew or marble.

If you find yourself looking for a way into something, pick up your favorite books—the ones you love in unfathomable ways—and scour the last page for a line that feels like a gauntlet. A line that wants to become a bone in a necklace.

Don’t continue the book or create a serial (that’s a different prompt, a different way of dealing with loss, a different relationship to temporality). Instead, start something from that line in the key of X…. Start in the unforgettable key and see what happens.