Closure

The year is 1990. The Berlin Wall came crashing down. Hair metal bands drowsily raise their hungover heads from their zebra striped beds and groupies as they hear their death knell played on a rickety guitar by a man from Aberdeen. The US plays in their first World Cup in over 50 years.

My original copy

And, on a much lighter note, in a small town in Washington, a bored young man was starting high school in the fall. In the summer before that fall, he wandered into a Waldenbooks (a chain that no longer even exists) and picked up a copy of "The Eye of the World", the first book in a trilogy that was to be written by Robert Jordan. It was an amazing fantasy book that really captured my imagination. I waited eagerly every year for the next book in the series to come out.

The trilogy turned into a five book series... and then it kept meandering on. It was the early 2000's that I lost interest in the series at around book 8 or 9. Jordan was lost in his own world, more obsessed with the details of his fantasy than with the plot or the heroes themselves. It was obvious that Jordan had no interest in ever ENDING the story, and why should he?  This was a cash cow for him that he could continue to milk. I stopped reading due to a brutal acknowledgement that I really just needed to cut my losses and abandon the series before I became too frustrated.

Eleven books into his series, Jordan died. I thought that was it for the series. Sadly, that's actually kind of how I expected it to end. I had no faith that Jordan even had the ability to tie the massive amount of plot threads he had constructed into any sort of coherent ending.

Then in 2007, Brandon Sanderson was announced as the man, blessed by Jordan's widow with Jordan's notes, to finish the series. It would, however, take him three books to do this. The first book of the end came out in 2009. I've written before how Sanderson was ruthless in the task of paring down the list of minor characters and plotlines that Jordan had become too attached to, which gave me a lot of hope.

Today, nearly a quarter of a century after starting this journey, I hold in my hands the last Wheel of Time book.

I'm hopeful that it will be good. In a weird kind of way, though, I don't think it matters. There simply is no ending that CAN live up to 23 years of buildup. What's important is that it will be done. If there is one thing my years have taught me, it's that often it's better for something to simply be done than to be perfect. It will be sad but sweet to bid farewell to Rand, Egwene, Mat, Perrin, and even Nynave, but we do need to part, to leave them to enter the aether and live on with the likes of Frodo, Merlin, Harry Potter, Reepicheep, and Puff the Magic Dragon in a land that even stories and imagination can't capture as we move on in our own lives. That we must all part is a fact of life, but we are so much richer for the journey together. In Jordan's own words from the first book (which appear in part at the beginning of every Wheel of Time book):

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.