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It’s never 5 o’clock when you need it to be. Time passes slowly when you want it to pass quickly. Therefore, in theory, if you could somehow stop wanting time to pass quickly…it finally would.

Neil Gaiman writes:

Yesterday I got a juicer. I dropped apples and celery and carrots and such into the top and watched everything that went in at the top turn into juice and pulp. Vegetables you could drink. “This is fun,” I thought.

I woke up from dreams this morning, in which my interest in juicing had led me to experiment with other things you could juice, and in which I had begun to juice books and photographs. I was mildly surprised to find that you could extract the essential essence from any book or picture in the form of a juice, removing the pulp. “Why has no-one else thought of this?” I wondered, as I turned several thick novels I’ve not had time to read into half a cup of pleasant-tasting liquid I could drink in moments. “I’ll probably get a medal for discovering this.”

And I woke up, half-disappointed, half-amused.

Just make sure not to mix Hunter S. Thompson with The Grapes of Wrath.

Over at Lemurama, Jon writes:

Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty probably had the best possible ending that he could have had. Where else could he have gone from there? As it stands, the movie ended with him basically happy, right?

To which I let Margaret Atwood respond:

You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.

And I’ll let Italo Calvino follow up:

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”