The Third Question, The End
The third question, The End, is about fixing the paper size first. Start the first letter large without checking the bottom edge and the last line will not fit. A drawing settles its scale before anything else. People know the end is there; they just never draw against it. Get the end wrong and the scale is wrong.
Look at the edge of the paper before the first letter
Say you have a list of names to write out on a single sheet.
You write the first one nice and large. The second about the same. Somewhere partway down you notice how little paper is left. From there the letters get smaller. The last two or three squeeze sideways or run off the page.
Everyone has made a sheet like that.
What went wrong there was not your handwriting. It was that you did not look at the bottom edge before the first letter.
Count the names, divide the length of the paper by that number, and the size of the first letter is decided for you. The last name lands in the last space — not because you write well, but because you looked at the end first.
People who draw for a living made a rule out of this.
Whatever the object, the first things fixed are the sheet size and the scale: how many millimetres of the real thing become one millimetre on the page. That is nailed down before a single line is drawn. Skip it and you can draw beautifully and still not fit at the end. By then it is too late. The only thing left is to start over.
And here is where it catches people.
When the scale is wrong, the shortage shows up at the end. But what was wrong was not the end. It was the first line.
Knowing it is not the same as drawing against it
There is a place here where you slip immediately.
Raise the subject of endings and it usually runs one of two ways. One says: so let us treasure today. The other says: it all ends anyway, so what is the point.
Both are places where you look at the end and then change nothing.
The feeling moves once and the drawing goes on exactly as before.
To be plain about it, that is the far more common outcome.
There is not one adult alive who does not know that people die. And there are very few who draw today’s line differently because of it.
So knowing the end is not the problem.
Knowing it and drawing against it are two different things.
The person writing out the names knew the bottom edge was there. It was in plain sight. He simply did not hold the first letter up against it.
And one line has to be drawn.
Looking at the end is not counting what is left.
Counting the years remaining only feeds the dread, and you cannot count them accurately anyway. Looking at the end means deciding what has to fit inside it. Not measuring the length of the paper — counting the names that have to go on it.
These are entirely different acts. The first one freezes people. The second one sets the size of the first letter.
He had forty years of drawings
For thirty years I sat where people tell you their lives, closer than anyone else.
There was a man who retired at sixty. Nearly forty years at one company, and for the last several of them he sat high. The year he left, he said he felt light.
About three years later he said this.
That the forty years inside the company were planned and nothing past them was. That the days ahead of him were blank.
He had lived with his retirement as the edge of the paper. He had planned up to it and shaped everything to reach it. But retirement was not the edge of the sheet; it was the middle of it.
Someone turning sixty today has more than twenty years in front of him, and thirty is not unusual.
So what he was short of was not time. It was scale.
He had drawn forty years as though they were the whole sheet, so the front came out large and there is no room left for the half that comes after. That half is not white space. It is the part that was never drawn.
And he did not stop there. He took what forty years had put into his hands and began looking for a way to make it earn online — looking, and getting ready.
Where is the edge of the paper you are drawing on now?
Did you fix it before you started — or are you taking as far as you have drawn to be the size of the sheet?
The size of the paper was not set by the one drawing on it
There are things this question cannot do.
Looking at the end first does not make the end come later. And nobody knows exactly where the edge of the paper is. This is where the question has to be most honest with itself.
The thing it wants to measure cannot be measured.
The scale still has to be set.
Not deciding does not leave you without a scale. It leaves you drawing at the scale of as far as I have got so far, and that is the most wrong scale there is. Taking retirement for the edge of the sheet was exactly that.
Not knowing and not deciding are two different things.
That is the end of the three questions.
Alone, you looked at your own grain. Together, at how two grains are joined. At the end, at the scale. None of the three is an answer; all three are questions, and none of them is asked once. You carry the three into the eight: the body, learning, work, love, marriage, children, money, and growing old.
And one thing is left over.
The size of the paper was not set by whoever draws on it. The paper arrives already cut. We are not on the side that fixes the size; we are on the side that has to find out what it is.
What that means will not be said here.
Only this much is certain: the one drawing did not cut the paper.