Stuck on the Barricades

Source:_Upon_These_Stones

I've been ploughing through "Les Miserables" for the better part of two months now. The first nine hundred pages flew by, and I felt pretty good about it. Then I hit the barricades. No, literally there's at least fifty pages of book spent behind a barricade, the characters fighting for a mildly dubious cause. I reached these barricades and came to a halt.
This should be the most exhilarating part of the book - bold youth taking a stance against the injustices of societies. Passionate prose and heroic deeds blend together to paint a glorious, devastating scene. I'd slogged through a hundred-page dissertation on the battle of Waterloo, a hundred more about an abbey and Catholic order that was long gone in the time of the author. I had sifted through pages and pages of political, social, and philosophical diatribes. All of them thoughtful, though not what some would call "gripping." These I read with pleasure, enjoying the insight I was given about the author. And yet, when I reach the one part of the book that might generally be called gripping, I stop. I cringe to
pick up the book. I read a dozen pages and put it down.

What is wrong with me?

When I get to the bottom of my feelings, I find fear. I didn't go into this book blind. I'd watched the movie, listened to the (much better) Broadway soundtrack. I know what comes at the end of the barricade. These glorious, innocent, passionate men are snuffed out, gone in a matter of a few dozen pages. And I realize I am not ready to embrace that end. I want an ending where their cause is heard, they are given fair treatment, where they are not all picked off in an old wine shop on a dirty street corner in Paris. An ending where they do not feel forced to pick up arms, and where the city's force does not have to meet such violence with their own.

There is another work I have been dragging my feet about: my own.
I'll sit down, type a few hundred words onto a page. Perhaps I'll collect data for the changes I want to make, start the second rough draft. But I am afraid to finish. A small part of me worries that, when this idea runs dry, my creativity will dry out with it. A small part of me doesn't want to finish because finish means ending, and ending means closure, and closure means I don't get this part of myself back. I'll have grown and changed with my work, and the end result will look nothing like what I started with.


And yet, maybe that is the whole point. Les Miserables doesn't end with everyone dying (... I don't think...). The people who survive to the end are changed, they look different. But maybe that's why the author writes about the barricades. Maybe he wants to draw people's attention to that seemingly small ripple in Paris' history, because he wants to show how these small upheavals lead to the growth and change of the individual and of society.
Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope for myself as well. The end of a story, and all of the change and growth that comes with it, doesn't have to mean the end of creativity. Maybe the end of one project just means I'm driven closer to the beginning of another. Maybe it means I will better understand the sound of my own voice as an author. Maybe it means learning how to use my voice to touch others. I won't know until I finish, so I should probably get to work.