Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel

No death, after all, does any life any justice. Our endings are always a letdown, an insult, a surprise, dumber than we thought and less than we’d hoped for.

We are all mankind a story, collectively and individually, and Kugel didn’t want his individual story to end in an ellipsis. A period, sure, if you’re lucky. An exclamation mark, okay. A question mark, probably; that seemed the punctuation all stories, collectively and individually, should end with after

There you are, waiting for the horrors to come from some there, from some other, from without, and all the while you’re dying, bit by airless bit, from within.