Quote:
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One of the great sorrows is that while our world is changing so fast about us, it is in a book that we find a place which is always familiar to us, and it is to a book that we have to go to find that comfort of place which we all seek.
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Lalwendė, this is the only thing you said that I disagree with. Tolkien addressed this in
On Fairy Stories, in his section on Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. A good fairy story helps us to "recover a clear view", as Tolkien put it, so that we see trees and clouds and even our neighborhood, with fresh eyes. Come to think of it, it's not only fairy stories that achieve this. Anyway, LotR sends us back into our own world with a fresh appreciation and hunger for those things the story revealed to us as beautiful and worthwhile. And we go and look for them in our own world. I find myself, for example, with an unstoppable hunger to go north, where there are fewer people and more trees and cleaner air. And so I go. I think that it's a good thing that I mourn the loss of a small forest that just got leveled to make room for a parking lot near my home. So rather than this being a sorrow, I consider it a gift that I have these books in my life to help me recover a clear view.