Over the past several months, I've been reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels. Or, at least, I've been trying to read them. I enjoy reading, and I usually get through new books quickly, but Tolkien has been slow going--sufficiently so that I've had to take a few breaks to read something more digestible. I could postulate reasons for why that's my fault rather than Tolkien's (and I bet a Tolkien fan or two will leave comments to that effect), but hundreds of pages of irregular pacing, half-hearted character development, and improbable dialogue have led me to a more direct conclusion: whatever his other talents, Tolkien just isn't a great writer.
Having said that, however, I have every intention of finishing the series, for a perhaps surprising reason: I've been profoundly affected by the books. Pervading the series is an overwhelming sense of reverence for the past: the men of Gondor look into the distant past to recall their former glory, history and heros are remembered through songs and poems passed generation to generation, and the preeminence of Rivendell is best understood by recognizing that the elves--having unbounded lifespan--are guardians of history all but lost to the rest of Middle Earth. With Tolkien's emphasis on the ancient and almost-forgotten, reading about Middle Earth evokes images of a medieval monastery on an overcast day--old, dark, and almost depressing, but also inspiring and beautiful.
I've become easily impacted by these sorts of emotions (and, correspondingly, increasingly interested in traveling to places where ancientness is on display). I can't completely articulate why this is the case, but allow me to conjecture a partial explanation: my memory now is not the memory I remember. I no longer remember the details of what I read and hear, and the once-precise recollections of my life are beginning to blur. As with Tolkien's writing, I can come up with purely circumstantial reasons--a grown-up, multi-tasked life precludes my giving full attention to anything, ruining any hopes of ambient memorization; and years of scientific training have reinforced a preference for understanding over regurgitation--but the truth is that my memory is losing its former sharpness, and it can only dull with age.
Trivialize it if you like--dismiss it as the idle navel-gazing of someone whose quarter-life crisis is in full swing or the lightweight drivel of someone who's trying too hard at philosophical depth--but this matters to me. It's legitimately tragic, precisely because there is nothing I can do to prevent it. For example, if I want to relive my childhood, I putatively can fire up the NES emulator and play Super Mario Brothers to my ten-year-old heart's content (actually I do this all the time). But it doesn't really work. Sure, every so often I catch a reminiscent whiff of the plastic cases that held our NES cartridges or a glimpse of what the Mushroom Kingdom looked like that first Christmas morning, but mostly I'm just overwriting old memories. Instead of associating Mario Brothers with my childhood home, now I'm just as likely to associate it with one of several college apartments. Similarly, I can re-read books that defined my life as a teenager (I do this a lot, too), but again I'm more likely to reinforce associations with the present than I am to conjure images of the past. The brain supports only a limited number of neural connections, and any gateway to the past becomes increasingly ineffective the more I use it.
It may not matter in any long-term sense whether or not I can remember my childhood Mario exploits or the feeling of reading Dune for the first time, but as I notice my memory fading, I feel like bits of me are slipping away--both without my permission and in spite of my best efforts. Like a small town trying to preserve its way of life against the press of modernity, I feel the need to protect my past from being swallowed up in the present. And as the gloomy, comfortable fog of agnosticism finally sets in, I'm forced to confront a stark reality: as those memories are forgotten, parts of who I am are lost forever. Not merely misplaced or damaged, but irretrievably lost and irreparably destroyed. And there's nothing I can do--nothing that will work, at least. Entropy knocks down all our sandcastles, even the ones we build of ourselves, and none of our noisy efforts at self-preservation can change the outcome.
I say that's a tragedy. If you still don't think it's sad, well, maybe we can't be friends anymore.
