published: 2025-08-12
One should finish one’s sentence because … it is easier said than done, whether spoken aloud or inscribed on stone, paper, or the cloud. A sentence, once begun, claims its right to conclude, as if its syntax were a parole board deciding its fate. Yet in the unthinking of thought, existence reveals itself not in completion, but in its continuation.
Descartes erred in crowning thought as the source of being; doubt precedes and endures beyond it. To carry on the sentence—even haltingly, even without a clear destination—is to affirm presence within the act itself. Finishing the sentence may grant closure, but closure is not synonymous with release.
To “finish one’s sentence” also resonates with a carceral echo: serving out a term, exhausting the time assigned. Yet language allows a stranger condition—one may finish one’s sentences without serving the sentence to completion. Words may cease, but the inquiry that gave rise to them remains alive—a sentence still being served long after the punctuation falls.
This is not error but record; the archive grows not through closures, but as evidence of ongoing service. Each dispatch is a filed fragment, each fragment a testament that the sentence—mine—continues. One serves these sentences not to escape them, but to keep them alive.
To persist is to be compelled to see one’s sentence through to its end, and one’s sentences, in turn, to completion. Persistence commits us not only to the existential sentence of our lives, stretching from birth to death, but also to the syntactic sentences of our thoughts, unfolding word by word. In this way, living through time and thinking through language become twin trajectories: both demand that we see things through, often beyond our choosing.
While finishing a sentence in grammar may offer a sense of closure, existence rarely provides such tidy conclusions. We persist, carrying on after our thoughts have ceased or our words have run dry, lingering in the spaces where meaning once gathered, seeking a resolution that language alone cannot supply.