Pianos falling
The movie version of The Maltese Falcon cuts my favorite part of the book, which is the Flitcraft episode. Sam Spade is reminiscing about one of his cases, a man named Flitcraft who just up and disappeared one day. Spade finds him living pretty much the same life he'd abandoned: same kind of job, lifestyle, family that he'd left behind. And here comes the Existential Explanation: one day Flitcraft had been walking along and had almost been hit by a falling piano, or maybe it's an anvil. I'm too lazy to go upstairs and check my edition. And he's profoundly spooked by this event which reveals the fragility of our existence, so he leaves his life and goes elsewhere. And Sam adds that this is what he likes the best about the story, that first Flitcraft had to get used to pianos falling from the sky, and then he had to get used to pianos not falling from the sky.

Except sometimes pianos do keep falling. Yes, I'm thinking of something specific that I have no right to appropriate for my silly little blog. One of my favorite little ironies is that I have trouble finishing anything, and my specialty in grad school was narrative theory, specifically the nature of endings and how they confer meaning. Which they do only in fiction, not life, though we persist in thinking that we do in fact find meaning in events.