A series of epigraphs for the last section of Here at the end of all things, “The Sense of Non-Endings”, which focuses on how fantastika’s failure to ever end is the very stuff of sense. I’m not sure what that means yet.
When the Emperour his justice hath achieved,
His mighty wrath’s abated from its heat,
And Bramimunde has christening received;
Passes the day, the darkness is grown deep,
And now that King in ‘s vaulted chamber sleeps.
Saint Gabriel is come from God, and speaks:
“Summon the hosts, Charles, of thine Empire,
Go thou by force into the land of Bire,
King Vivien thou’lt succour there, at Imphe,
In the city which pagans have besieged.
The Christians there implore thee and beseech.”
Right loth to go, that Emperour was he:
“God!” said the King: “My life is hard indeed!”
Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard.SO ENDS THE TALE WHICH TUROLD HATH CONCEIVED.
—The Song of Roland
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”–Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
“Strike then, Bogle, if thou darest,” shouted out Childe Rowland, and rushed to meet him with his good brand that never yet did fail. They fought, and they fought, and they fought, till Childe Rowland beat the King of Elfland down on to his knees, and caused him to yield and beg for mercy. “I grant thee mercy,” said Childe Rowland, “release my sister from thy spells and raise my brothers to life, and let us all go free, and thou shalt be spared.” “I agree,” said the Elfin King, and rising up he went to a chest from which he took a phial filled with a blood-red liquor. With this he anointed the ears, eyelids, nostrils, lips, and finger-tips, of the two brothers, and they sprang at once into life, and declared that their souls had been away, but had now returned. The Elfin king then said some words to Burd Ellen, and she was disenchanted, and they all four passed out of the hall, through the long passage, and turned their back on the Dark Tower, never to return again. And they reached home, and the good queen, their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widershins again.
–Joseph Jacobs, “Childe Rowland”
What do you mean?
To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower.
He saw it at once and understood, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time’s curse lifted), but to the moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would immediately succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many times would he travel it?–Stephen King, The Dark Tower 827
There was a peculiar inevitability to everything I did, as if the air around me was gently coercing my movements, from raising the Macallen to climbing the stairs to laboring through “Childe Roland” last night. I couldn’t shake the poem. It was like a maddening soft mental loop: The Dark Tower is the end … The point of getting to the end is to realise you’ve got to the end … The quest has no purpose … The Dark Tower is the end … The end is the fulfillment … My first thought was, he lied in every word …
–Glen Duncan, By Blood We Live 296
evening redness 