All that is good reaches finality, and thus a sad day envelopes the earth, for we have come to an end with the adventures of MonkeyZen. A terrible and most troubling end.

Panel the First: MonkeyZen stands alone, relaxed yet not in repose. For an occasion, we can see comparatively much of his form, denied only the vision of his manipulative hands and feets.

Panel the Second: Our point of the view shifts backwards, away-wards, and we see that MonkeyZen is upon an island alone. Further, do we not perchance note a shifting in his posture, a making of tension and clasping of fists, a gasping of breath and rounding of optically imperfect eye?

Panel the Third: We drift back and away ever further, and the shadows shroud, and he, our MonkeyZen, is on the very cusp of being The Lost.

Brief Interpretation: It is a thing unpossible to not, at this time, reflect upon the oft quote seventeenth meditation of that great primate thinker (although, one supposes, an actually mediocre thinker in the grander scheme which includes both sides of the Seas silvery meniscus) John the Don (or, Finished as it were), who reflected upon the gonging anti-harmonics of the tolling bells, noting

No primate is an island, entire of itself; every primate is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or if thine own were: any primate's death diminishes me, because I am involved in primatekind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

At first inspection, these posits are obvious in the extreme: it takes not a wizened tortoise to know that monkey is not island much as hawk is not handsaw and apple is not orange; we require not the precise and accurate eye of the electronic eel to report that any finite amount minus some portion (regardless of how infinitesimal) will nonetheless ultimately be of a lesser sum. We put upon the colors of sarcasm, bow deeply, and bluster "Thank you, our great Rocketing Scientist John Don for giving unto us such tremendous spoils of wisdom! Forever we must bow and grovel at your clever, fingerless feet! All hail John Don, cleverest humpmonkey in all the Dryless Waste!"

But quell, quell, quell your sarcastic bombardments of John Don's memory, for he takes the route of childish simplicity to re-introduce us to the ideas fundamental— much as MonkeyZen, at once a baby-in-nought and a wizened, nude monkey, brings back to us those lessons of self and other and socials and psychologies which otherwise remain unexplored and un-recalled, left to moulder in forgetfulsloth.

MonkeyZen is truly that clod who washes away, robbing all of Europe of some essential sliver, without which all the whole is poorer . . . much as we, on this final day of the Monkied Zen, are poor indeed.

The note is misstruck in this, the last installment of NickSnow's MonkeyZen. We are here as conflicted as a starving mother faced with the plump and delectable face of her healthy babe. To what way shall we turn?

Questions, always and only, there are the questions who remain.

Perplexed, Now More Than Ever,
Your Giant Squid