The last word on Parting

Every parting gives a foretaste of death - Schopenhauer

AC Grayling for The Guardian

Saturday May 25, 2002

Partings might be endings, or new beginnings; they might be too temporary for the sweet sorrow they are poetically identified with, or - as always in the case of a collapsed domestic arrangement where one party has not yet finished being in love - they might leave wounds that either take too long to heal, or never do.

The idea of a parting of the ways (in the literal sense of a fork in the road) offers the following conundrum. You come to the parting, and do not know which road to take in order to reach your destination. Two people are stationed there, and you know that one is consistently veracious, the other an invariable liar. You do not know which is which, yet you are allowed only one question. What do you ask?

No matter what the circumstances, to part from anything of value, whether people or things, places or occupations, is to forfeit something of oneself. It is as if the other entity had grown into one, sending a tentacle under the skin, suggesting the reason for describing oneself as attached to them. In a frozen food warehouse once I saw a workman leave the palm of his hand on the surface of a box; he had made the mistake of taking off his glove. In "Rondel de l'adieu" Edmond Haraucourt expresses the metaphorical version of this, associating it with the Schopenhauerian idea of thereby tasting a fraction of mortality, in a verse from which a well-known song takes a line: "To leave is to die a little;/ It is to die to what one loves;/ One leaves behind a little of oneself/At any hour, any place."

A test of Bruno Bettelheim's view that fairy tales offer children preparations for life - seeing parental death, or perhaps just adulthood, allegorised in Hansel's and Gretel's abandonment in a wood; and obviously, sexual awakening in the prince's buss on Sleeping Beauty's lips - would be to see how many of them concern partings. Both of these are about partings (from childhood, from innocence) and since every progression through life is a parting from what went before, they are a good augury that Bettelheim's thesis stands up. Such canticles of parting teach that to gain you have to give up, that to be alive is to change, and change involves the death of things so that they can become the past. Consider the tale of the Seven Ravens, who are brothers metamorphosed by a curse. Their sister leaves home to look for them, and cuts off a finger to serve as a key to unlock the door of the Glass Mountain where they live. In this tale a sequence of partings makes a homecoming - which no doubt all the best do.

André Gide was of the optimistic tendency that sees a fresh start in every parting, while a more sardonic Italian proverb has it that too many starts make for few endings. In fact, rather few partings are endings, despite the truth in the opening flourish above; when Ruskin wrote "God alone can finish", he was not being pious, but succinct: paintings, like poems, are never finished, only abandoned, so when the maker of them parts from them, it is not because they have come to an end, but because more than half of all art is knowing when to stop.

The answer to the conundrum of the forked road is: you ask one of the men (it does not matter which) to point out the road that the other man would say is your route. And then, since the pointed-out road will be the wrong one, you take the other road. For the liar will lie about which road the truth-teller would indicate, and the truth-teller will indicate the liar's choice; so both will point at the wrong road. This happily mimics life: the right road is usually clear to anyone who will give some thought to the puzzle of which, among so many wrong roads, is the right one, for truth and falsehood combine to give truth whenever ways reach a parting.

[Thoughts…..?]