[Rimbaud]

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."


Interestingly, prior to posting, I took the test to which you link, and came out as a 'Linguistic Thinker'. Although such devices are to be approached not so much with a pinch of salt as an ocean's worth, the result tallies with what I was planning to say.

There are two levels within me on reading Tolkien. These I shall call, for simplicity, the Child and the Critic; the latter is now always in play with all my reading, the former only with books of a particular hue (JRRT and similar being a good example).

I use a colour-based metaphor with deliberation, for as the test result above suggests, it is the material, the fabric of the thing that affects me now, the warp and the woof of the words that stitch together my experience. The Child was and is awakened by the heady rush of story, the impetus, the turns, and later in life now, by the shimmer of well-worked language - the Child wants to be transported. The Critic (for wont of a better term, although critic has unwelcome connotations in this analogy), when reading JRRT, is enthralled by the language as the work itself, by the structure, the pacing, the tone. The words themselves, the phrase and the poise are what this half seeks. Absorption is desired, yet always kept at hand's distance. The Critic is like the ancient paradigm - how to you discuss consciousness from a viewpoint that will never be outside of it?

It is also, naturally, this half that also finds the disappointments within the books, but yet sometimes, the very greatest pleasure. For often now, the Child remains unawakened, that sense of wonder diminished as I read more and more, and review, and reccommend, and critique, but the older half can sometimes lead the Child to see new benefits. Very few works awaken this more primitive sense of wonder directly now, and it is to the credit of the ME mythologies that they rouse both to wakefulness.

So here, two levels: one is feeling the crops in the fields around the Shire brush against my head and arms (bringing personal memories of childhood, often spent in such fields back to me), the other is noting the well-cut sentence, the finely tuned chapter, the awkward shift of tone; yet these come together, to leave the cloth of the whole to be admired.