Beauty of things left hanging

Unfinished business is usually frowned upon, or tut-tutted. For a country that has been all too familiar with incomplete projects, the downsides of not seeing things through is palpable. In the world of reading, most people are familiar with DNFing – ‘did not finish’ the book that was started. In this context, it is usually the book that is blamed for being too boring or too difficult to plough through and finish, not the reader. But in almost all other endeavours, leaving things unfinished is seen as lack of fortitude and enterprise on the part of the person who had started the journey.

In very rare cases, though, creative works left unfinished take on a special sheen – an irrational one, where people come to the, well, conclusion that the objet d’art would have been less impressive if it had been completed. In music, most famously, there is Franz Schubert‘s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, known popularly as his ‘Unfinished Symphony‘. It can be argued that Leonardo da Vinci‘s c. 1480 unfinished painting (and he had many left incomplete), ‘Saint Jerome‘ is a shimmering masterpiece that predates surrealism by centuries. In our era, however, when completion is celebrated,