Distant Star - Closing

A taxi pulled up beside us. Look after yourself, my friend, he said, and off he went.

The Master and Margarita - Closing

The next morning he wakes up silently but perfectly calm and well. His needled memory grows quiet, and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor -- neither the noseless killer of Gestas, not the cruel fifth prosecutor of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.

[1928-1940]

Constructing Pakistan - Closing

Pakistan is a nation of over one hundred and sixty million people, and it has, like so many other postcolonial nations, struggled to produce, articulate, and popularise its normative structure. Due to its strategic location, its recent problematic role as a regional US ally in the war against terror, and its national potential as a leading Muslim nuclear power, Pakistan is one of the most important Mulsim nation-states of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, since the terrorist attacks of 2001, Pakistan has been mostly represented a problem both in the media as well as in the scholarly works produced in the United States. Thus, I hope that my attempt at articulating the formative national history of Pakistan will facilitate a more engaged public debate and academic scholarship on the past, present, and the future of Pakistan.

ابن الو قت - اختتام

حجۃالاسلام: میں امید کرتا ہوں کہ مزہب کے متعلق جو کچھ میں نے اب تک تم سے کہا پہلے حصے یعنی نفس اسلام کی نسبت تمہاری تشفی کر سکتا ہے بشرطیکہ تم کو تشفی درکار ہو اور جب اسلام کی اصلی اور حقیقی عمدگی تمہارے زہن میں اچھی طرح بیٹھ جائے گی ، جس کی شناخت یہ ہے کہ اعمال اضطراراْ سر زد ہونے لگیں تو میری یہ بات لکھ کر رکھو کہ انگریزی وضع خود تم ہی کو بہ تقاضائے مزہب وبال معلوم ہونے لگے گی۔ رہا دوسرا حصہ یعنی اسلام کے فرقوں میں کسی فرقہ خاص کی تعین اس کو کسی دوسرے وقت پر رکھو۔

A Party For Boris - Closing

The Oldest Cripple
Boris
Cripple shakes Boris several times
All look at Boris
Johanna suddenly
He's dead
screaming
He's dead
to The Good Woman
He's dead
Boris is dead
exeunt All with the exception of The Good Woman, either wheeling themselves in their wheelchairs or being wheeled in silence by the attendants and waiters and backing out of the room. Hardly is The Good Woman alone with Boris's corpse when she bursts into horrible peals of laughter.

THE END

The Tragedy of King Lear - Closing

KENT I have a journey sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me; I must not say no.
EDGAR The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Exeunt with a dead march

A Handful Of Dust - Closing

Teddy surveyed his charges with pride and affection. It was by means of them that he hoped one day to restore Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his Cousin Tony.

THE END

Thousand Cranes - Closing

He wiped his face with his handkerchief. The blood seemed to leave as he wiped, and he wiped more violently. The handkerchief was wet and dark. He felt a cold sweat at his back.
"She has no reason to die," he muttered.
There was no reason for Fumiko to die, Fumiko who had brought him to life.
But had the simple directness of the evening before been the directness of death?
Was she, like her mother, guilt-ridden, afraid of the directness?
"And only Kurimoto is left." As if spitting out all the accumulated venom on the woman he took for his enemy, Kikuji hurried into the shade of the park.

Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark - Closing

FORTINBRAS Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal; and for his passage,
The soldier's music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go bid the soldiers shoot.
Exeunt marching, after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off

The Enigma Of Arrival - Closing

Our sacred world -- the sanctities that had been handed down to us as children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because we had seen them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy of home, though I was to learn that the ground was bloody, that there had been aboriginal people there once, who had been killed or made to die away -- our sacred world had vanished. Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honour and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that we when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden.


October 1984 -- April 1986

Agamemnon - Closing

Chorus
Crow and strut, brave cockerel by your hen; you have no threats to fear.

Clytaemestra
These are howls of impotent rage; forget them, dearest; you and I
have the power; we two shall bring good order to our house
at least.

(They enter the house. The doors close. All persons leave the stage.)

Sunlight on a Broken Column - Closing

Asad's voice called, "Laila, where are you?"

I got up quickly, wiping my eyes as his tall, thin figure was silhouetted at the door.

"Laila," he said, blinking at the shadows, "what have you been doing so long in this empty house?"

"I have been waiting for you, Asad. I am ready to leave now."

Voss - Closing

"Voss did not die," Miss Trevelyan replied. "He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it."

"Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?"

"The air will tell us," Miss Trevelyan said.

By which time she had grown hoarse, and fell to wondering aloud whether she had brought her lozenges.

Twelfth Night - Closing

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you every day.

Phaedo - Closing

Such was the end of our comrade, Echecrates, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wises and the most upright.

JR - Closing

---- for all these here letters and offers I been getting because I mean like remember this here book that time where they wanted me to write about success and like free enterprise and all hey? And like remember where I read you on the train that time where there was this big groundswell about leading this here parade and entering public life and all? So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening ... ?

Principles Of Human Knowledge - Closing

For after all, what deserves the first place in our studies, is the consideration of God, and our duty ; which to promote, as it was the main drift and design of my labours, so shall I esteem them altogether useless and ineffectual, if by what I have said I cannot inspire my readers with a pious sense of the presence of God : and having shewn the falseness or vanity of those barren speculations, which make the chief employment of learned men, the better dispose them to reverence of learned men, the better dispose them to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and to practise is the highest performance of human nature.

Suppliant Women - Closing

THESEUS

Athena, queen,I'll do as you direct me.

You steady me, keep me from going awry.

This man I'll blind with an oath. I only ask now:

Keep me on course. Look favorably on our city.

And then we'll manage safely for all time.

CHORUS

So, Adrastus, let's leave, having made our vow

to this man and his town. Those who've done so much

deserve our respect and compliance.

Hippolytus - V:1490

CHORUS

Down on the city

strokes without warning:

all's desolation.

Rain down, O flowing

tears of our mourning.

Death of a great one

wails among nations.

(Curtain.)

Electra - Closing

CHORUS

Farewell. The mortal life that does well,

that never meets misfortune,

is a life most truly blessed.