I love the incompleteness of the Gospel of Mark. It ends without ending: "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." (Mark 16:8) It invites us to ask, "But if they said nothing to anyone, how come we've heard of this?" Evidently, it didn't end there.
This evening I was re-reading Thomas Hoover's "Zen Culture" when I came across these comments: "The ideas taught by asymmetry in the visual arts are paralleled in the literary arts by the device of suggestion ... Explicit art ends with itself; suggestive art is as limitless and profound as one's imagination can make it." The Gospel of Mark is just that: suggestive, profound, not limited by the ending of the text.
