Can a story begin in the middle?  The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 at the age of 31, was known for writing stories that did not seem to have a beginning.  They seemed to end before they began.  Their first words conveyed a narrative well underway, as if the reader was being let in on it after the fact, as if the reader needed to acquaint herself, on her own, with the details of how the plot arrived at this point.  The reader was suspended, caught between a beginning that never began and an end that did not seem to have a reason to be so.
     Emotionally brazen and intellectually bold, Mansfield startled many writers of her day with her innovative approach to story.  On the other hand, she may well have captured, more than her compatriots, how life really is.  Although our lives are stories in and of themselves, we who live them do not always know how the plot came to be what it is.  We plan, we act, we recall, we remember, but we do not always know how it all comes about.  More often than not, the context in which we live our days determines what happens, so that we often feel as if we have either stepped into a maelstrom of unexpected circumstances or various levels of bliss that we cannot always explain, a serendipity whose origins elude us.  Forward we travel, looking, thinking, but not always knowing where it is all going or what it all means.
     D. H. Lawrence, one of Mansfield's colleagues and best known for his risqué novel Women in Love, said after she died--far too young (she contracted tuberculosis)--that the dead still speak.  In a way, Lawrence was right.  They speak because although they are gone materially, their stories, truncated and confused and glorious though they may be, continue to flow, ebbing into a vast and seemingly endless sea of human adventure and endeavor, a sea whose beginning, middle, and end only have meaning because millennia ago a greater purpose brought them into being.
     Otherwise, middle, beginning, or end do not matter, do not matter at all, for no one, captives of finitude they be, knows how to know and understand what they are.