Out on a walk along the bog roads, around the shorelines, up hills, and down hollows this afternoon, I listened to what ended up being the final episode of a podcast about James Joyce’s Ulysses by an Irish novelist and journalist named Frank Delaney. In the show, titled Re:Joyce, Delaney worked through the novel at around a page or so an episode, explaining the almost countless references and allusions in a book that has confused and confounded readers for over a century. Delaney didn’t know it would be his last episode; he had only made it about halfway through, and by his own calculation still had seven and a half years to go. He died of a stroke in 2017 at the age of seventy-four, having just completed his 368th episode.

When it comes to unfinished undertakings, Delaney was far from an isolated case. Leonardo da Vinci left trails of half-completed work. The Brothers Karamazov was meant to begin a trilogy that never happened. Composers leave sketches that hint at a symphony that never arrives. There is even the case of J.M.W. Turner, who would turn up at galleries to amend paintings that were already hanging. I’ve heard it said of London that it will be a lovely city when they finally finish it. You stop where time stops you, and something is only finished until it isn’t.

The ancient Greek statesman and lawmaker Solon said, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ and you can find references to the phrase throughout ancient texts, and even in works such as Steinbeck’s East of Eden – a measure of its reach. You only really get the whole picture of a person at the end, and even then it’s someone else doing the final tally. From the middle, everything looks partial because it is. We don’t remember the beginning, and anyone past a certain age will tell you that things can start to get blurry toward the end. That’s true within ourselves, too. We meet one another in fragments – scenes, seasons, impressions, memories – and fill in the blanks for the rest. So it makes sense that our various pursuits throughout life, which are only pieces of a larger thing, also look unfinished. The larger whole of life- that’s the actual work. Unfinished things aren’t failures; they’re how everything appears from the inside.

By no means is it always a bad thing to stop short, and there’s no harm in leaving people wanting more. I was once told a simple formula for navigating parties: arrive late and leave early, before goodwill turns. I certainly haven’t always followed that advice, but when I have, it’s held me in good stead. In the case of dying before the work is completed, however – and to paraphrase a remark by the author Christopher Hitchens – it’s as though you get tapped on the shoulder and told not that the party’s over but, slightly worse, that the party’s still going on and you have to leave.

After three years of Re:Joyce in my ears, Delaney had become something of a companion on these walks, so his abrupt exit felt almost rude – though admittedly on brand for an Irishman. Not his fault, obviously- when you have to go, you have to go.

And it goes both ways. There are things in my own life I’ll never finish, and somewhere there must be someone waiting for a resolution I promised years ago. We don’t always know who’s expecting what from us – or when they stop waiting. Still, I took the small win available at the time: I reached my destination and got back home again. A beginning, a middle, an end – enough for one afternoon at least. Tomorrow can be a new undertaking.