[Iarwain]

Thanks for the understanding. I honestly don't mean to be offensive in any way.

I suppose for a while I felt a bit lost. I spent four or five years exploring Tolkien's corpus and rereading LotR, and then I stopped, and found myself longing for the days when I had read so much. I read some odd fiction, and a little nonfiction, and it was enjoyable but not enriching on the same level as Tolkien. I finished reading 1984, for instance, and didn't feel like I'd benefited as a person. I had perhaps been indoctrinated a little further against totalitarianism, but real values or ideas didn't come to me through it. Tolkien had given me a moral view of the world. This is fascinating, because he certainly doesn't moralize directly. Tolkien's books were the legends and folktales I grew up on, and they ended up serving the same function as traditional legends and folktales.

At some point I randomly picked up a copy of Plato's Republic. I read a bit, and put it down, picked it up again a few months later, and then dropped it again. This kept happening until one week I decided I was going to read through the whole thing. It was dull, filled with ridiculous views on eugenics and common marriage and poetry. It seemed something of a silly book and I didn't really see what made it so special.

Not long after I was required for school to read Mortimer J. Adler's "How to Read a Book". Adler lays out an excessively rigorous method of reading. The "proper" reader, according to Adler, makes detailed outlines, lists definitions, reconstructs arguments, and doesn't judge until he understands what's being said. I was inspired by Adler's book, and so I turned to the Republic, and started making an outline. Suddenly the book sprang to life, and I saw how incredibly unified and well-planned it was. More than that, I understood how Plato's view of justice, knowledge, and the Good applied to reality and made a lot of sense.

At the end of Adler's book, there was a list of books worth reading well (i.e. using his method), and so I looked for one that sounded really tough and interesting. Eventually I picked Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", and I spent about eight months struggling through it. It was a book like none I'd read before, fiction or non-fiction. Kant asks questions I'd never thought of: things about knowledge and perception and experience. Above all, he's difficult to read, and I would sometimes labor for up to half an hour on a page before I felt comfortable enough to move on. I've learned since that Kant is well known as one of the most difficult philosophers, but when I reached an understanding of his meaning, the insight and excitement were truly wonderful. I ended up really loving the Critique of Pure Reason. It gave me more than just a good reading experience; it gave me insights into the way people think and how we know what's true and what's not.

After I finished Kant's Critique, I felt burned out, and returned to my listlessness. I wanted to read something else rewarding on that level, but perhaps a little easier to get through. Kant and Plato had written in a way that communicated things about life. They were speaking directly to the reader, asking questions and suggesting answers. They were directly concerned with reality, in a way almost none of the books I'd read before were. Most of the fiction I'd read was either an exercise in triviality (e.g. the "Myst" novels, "Dune", Dumas' "Monte Cristo"), or had meaning only in a very indirect way. Somehow, next, I ended up reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which showed that fiction could do the same thing as the heavier philosophy I'd read, and communicate with beauty and poeticism I had not yet experienced.

Dostoevsky did more with his story than any author I'd read. Not only is his language more expressive and beautiful, but his characters have a reality that goes far beyond what Tolkien was creating. They deal with genuine human issues, they're living in the real world, they struggle with confusion because the line between good and evil isn't so clear. They have moral and spiritual difficulties that I can identify with. The structure of his book brings out all of these insights, and keeps us awake. We don't glide through Dostoevsky like we're watching a movie. We're intensely conscious of the overarching significance of the events of the novel, not just for the characters, but for our own view of the world.

There's more and obviously I could go on with a reading history for quite a while. As it is, I've simplified the above. There were lots of books read between these three and while I was reading them.

In any case, after quite a lot of expansion and realization, I returned this past summer to the Lord of the Rings, having left it alone in my bookcase for about four years. I appreciated a bit more some of the literary merits of Tolkien's writing, and how wonderfully networked various events and characters are. Most of all, I think I see now that LotR is an epic in the spirit of Homer, with Tolkien's values replacing Homer's. Instead of Homeric kleos, Tolkien uses self-sacrifice. He lauds the wisdom of Gandalf and Elrond over the sinister cleverness of Odysseus, and the helplessness of tiny Frodo over the arrogant rage of Achilles. It's a beautiful story, with wonderful moral implications, and it makes a monumental prose epic. I've just found that with the foundation Tolkien provided me, I could move on to better, richer books. I wanted to spare anyone who happens to be in the same position I once occupied that boredom of floating around with an unrealized desire for great literature, and urge them to explore the classics.


My apologies for any offense, I ought to have explained more fully from the start.



Thanks for enduring my longwindedness,
Iarwain