A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who--when he has been seriously noted at all--has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.'
This is yet another example of my favored writers-writing-about-writing style (see also the beginning of The Sea, The Sea), but what I notice this time is the 'then': "if I had believed then in a God..." I hadn't seen it before, but it raises a question of when the narrator is retelling the story, and whether the end is even particularly the end for the narrator, or whether this is a half-reconstructed memory of a period of intense feeling in his life--something like the end of The Heart of the Matter, had that character decided differently.
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