I've been thinking about the relationship between a book's opening scene and its final scene, and how the best novels make the two resonate in ways that aren't obvious on first reading. Gilead opens with John Ames writing to his son in the present tense of his illness. It ends with the same gesture — a blessing, an acknowledgment, a form of love that survives the person who offers it. The beginning and the ending are the same moment seen from different distances.

This kind of structural rhyme requires the author to have known the ending before writing the beginning. It's not revision — it's architecture. The opening is written to be recalled at the end.

I now pay attention to opening scenes with the question in mind: what will this mean again at the end? Sometimes I'm wrong. When I'm right, the resonance produces a different kind of pleasure — the pleasure of structure revealed.