The finitude of life

The finitude of life is presented as the abrupt limit encountered by a process that has unfolded across billions of years. The closing fragments place death beside evolution, bodily existence, and the possibility of a story without an authorized guide: life’s long making and its swift ending are not reconciled, but held together as the book’s final measure of human vulnerability.

Evolution and the Mortal Race

A fragment casts an unnamed figure suddenly seated in the saddle of a race running from alpha to omega, a race already condemned to death. The rider does not remember mounting the horse, as though entry into life and its forward motion have occurred without conscious choice. The image turns evolutionary existence into a contest whose finish is known in advance: movement continues, but mortality is built into its course.

This racing image makes the beginning and the end inseparable. Alpha and omega mark the full span, yet the rider’s missing memory interrupts any illusion of mastery over that span. Life is not described as a journey deliberately selected and controlled; the figure finds himself already in motion, carried along a course that leads toward death.

Embodiment and Extinction

Comodín is described as an angel in distress who, through a fatal misunderstanding, dressed himself in flesh and blood. His original wish had been only to share the conditions of the primates. The account gives mortality a strange double aspect: embodied life is an exposure to danger, but it is also the condition through which a nonhuman being can enter the primates’ world. Comodín’s predicament makes the boundary between the animal and the extraordinary porous without making bodily vulnerability disappear.

Another fragment places Comodín close to eternal extinction and gives that approach a paradoxical consequence. The nearer he comes to extinction, the more clearly he sees the animal greeting him in the mirror as he faces a new day. The mirror does not offer escape from finitude; it sharpens recognition of the animal self. The fragment joins the daily act of facing a new day to the prospect of an ending, making continued life and approaching extinction coexist in a single image.

The Open Story

The closing passages also describe the door of the tale as standing wide open. Someone, it seems, ought to report what has happened, yet there is no authority to whom such a report can be made. This absence gives mortality a narrative dimension: the story reaches beyond any secure institution capable of confirming, interpreting, or closing it. The open door offers no promise that death can be explained or adjudicated; it leaves the account exposed to the reader’s interpretation.

That openness resonates with the image of the condemned race. Both deny the comfort of an external guarantee: the rider does not recall choosing to begin, and the open tale has no authority waiting to explain its passage. The book’s treatment of finitude therefore remains both concrete and unresolved, grounded in bodily life and extinction while leaving the meaning of that passage open.

Billions of Years, Seconds

The final statement gives the contrast its most exact scale: it takes billions of years to create a human being, and only seconds to die. Creation is measured by an immense span; death by a handful of seconds. The compressed opposition does not claim that a life’s meaning can be calculated from its duration. Instead, it sets the slow accumulation of evolutionary time against the speed with which an individual existence can end.

Placed beside the rider’s fatal race, Comodín’s flesh-and-blood predicament, and the animal in the mirror, this closing contrast gathers the fragments into a single tension. A human being is the outcome of time on a scale almost impossible to imagine, yet remains subject to a sudden ending. The finitude of life is thus not merely a final event: it is the condition that makes the long history of becoming and the brief fact of dying belong to the same story.