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.
11 comments:
This is very sad, and last night, it made me think of Oedipus at Colonus, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_at_Colonus)which I think you should read.
This is the last play Sophocles wrote, and it reflects the sadness of old age and the loss of life (and not in the sense of physical death, but the loss of life as it was once known).
"Oh Theseus, dear friend, only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world almighty Time obliterates, crushes all to nothing..."
We can still be friends, right?
Here one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books:
"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."-The Road
I think this is sad as well. Amen and Amen to everything you have written. It was beautiful and tragic! I like it when you blog! Thank you for finally posting something new!
PS Happy Anniversary??? A while ago?? Right? You and Amanda are great.
Sometimes people are better at some things then others, overall things can still be good. I mean, I likes Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and it sure wasn't the dialogue that kept me coming back!
Great post! At the end of this post, I feel like I understand myself better. You took a real emotion and honestly searched it out. Thanks for doing that. Feel free to take as much time as you need between blog posts.
Personally, though I think we should try to remember and find new ways to remember*, I hope the atonement will eventually help me remember everything again. That'll be a happy day.
*Am I allowed footnotes in a small comment?
Amanda: Perfect; I'll read Sophocles the next time I need a break from Tolkien. Hope he's got snappy dialogue!
Marie: I had no idea I'd been scooped by Mr. McCarthy. Thanks for the quote. As much as I loved The Road, I hadn't remembered that particular reference.
Hacksaw: Lucas is a great example. Sometimes laughable dialogue, mediocre acting, and yet he is (was?) a sufficiently talented storyteller that we all loved Star Wars. But Tolkien isn't even a good storyteller. His real talent is for creating and fully fleshing out an entirely different world.
Warren: Thank you; that's extremely kind. You are certainly allowed footnotes. And you're right: things like journaling and careful record-keeping are important ways to slow the decline, because they provide such a rich palette of remembering.
Some people just can't handle the flava of J.R.R.
In any case, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote a good poem about it called "Über Vergänglichkeit" (On the Transitory). You can find the English at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001114.
Lord of the Rings was one of the sacred cannons of my childhood. Probably because of that I am overly defensive of Tolkien.
I recognize that there are shortcomings in his writing, but I don't think he is guilty of anything above what other reknown writers have done. Tolkien wrote before the era of editors. So yes, the pacing is irregular. There are whole chapters (Tom Bombadil) that seem to have little to no signficance to the final story, but Dickens, Hugo, Cervantes, and Tolstoy could all be accused of the same thing. Also, Tolkien is widely considered the father of an entire genre of fiction and although flawed, his writing was revolutionary. We have C.S. Lewis's works today because of him.
I do think that Tolkien captures that the present is the natural consequence of all of the moments past. Generations of history and evolution cannot be described or justified in a single story. I am not sure if it is an American or Gen-X compulsion to look for the most simple or symbolic encapsulation of the past in a sort of Citizen Kane/Rosebud sort of way, but I think it is a dangerous practice and I appreciate Tolkien's effort to tell more of the backstory, even when it is long and sometimes half-developed.
As for the fading memories of the past, I think you are right, but I believe there is a difference between trying to relive those moments as adults as a sort of emotional time-traveling device and paying tribute to where we all came from. We cannot go back to the first NES Christmas morning but we can cherish the fact that we had a childhood where NES Christmases existed by saving a few princesses now and again.
Heather: welcome back, and thanks again for your comments. I don't think you sound overly defensive. In return, I'll try not to go too hard on the offense.
So I'll start with where we agree. I've never read Dickens, Cervantes, or Tolstoy, but a sharp editor would likely have saved Hugo (and the rest of us!) from his excessive excesses. It's pretty clear that Hugo wasn't all that worried about telling us about Jean Valjean, but instead focused on telling us every opinion he ever had about anything ever. In the sense of unedited excess, Tolkien is in good company among 19th century novelists.
But if you look at Tolkien through the lens of great 20th century literature, he comes off the loser. I don't know when the age of the editor started (my Wikipedia searches have been in vain), but I'm willing to bet the movement was well under way by the mid 1950s. I don't think it's a coincidence that Tolkien's first publisher refused to publish LOTR without significant cuts, and that his second publisher refused to publish The Silmarillon. Certainly other 20th century authors--Fitzgerald, Hemingway (whose prose was so sparse it was hardly there), Faulkner, and even C.S. Lewis--had learned to write concise, tightly-constructed narratives without sacrificing depth.
Let me emphasize that I don't mean to marginalize Tolkien's contributions. He did, as you say, found an entire genre essentially from scratch. But I argue that Tolkien is famous precisely because he founded the genre, in spite of his meager literary talents. His genius isn't in prose or storytelling, and it's certainly not in characterization. His genius is in his ability to reach back into history and myth, crafting from it an entire world that is timeless, archetypical, and compelling. But, just as Hugo was too distracted by his scattered thoughts to give us a coherent narrative about Valjean, Tolkien is too preoccupied with telling us about Middle-earth that the story of the ring is pushed to the sidelines. And, beautiful as Middle-earth be, the result is the same: they're both a little bloated and occasionally unreadable.
Whatever, Tolkien sucks. Dickens is excessively boring and overly descriptive. Cerventes, while hilarious, re-emphasizes his main theme too often-about 100 times too often, and yes I've read all 3. Anyway, on to your main theme-sadness and the death of memory. I am sad now (so we are still friends) but I am happy to commiserate. I thought all of my memory instability was connected with my crianiotomies-turns out I'm just another doddering 20 something. So buck up, put down the Tolkien, and pick up something pleasent and trite.
Awww, Puls! We're still friends!
That is sad. I suppose I am usually tide up, like a toddler, in the here and now ... what's that noise over there? ... However, I assume that everything I am now is a summation of my past, and perhaps therefore in spending so much time in the present, I remember the past. But in all likelihood, that is just the vain hope of someone who doesn't want to acknowledge his ever increasing ADD.
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