Are you Satisfied?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

The books aren't like drugs to me. What they are like, is comfort food for my mind, but comfort food which is different in a little way every time. Like my grandmother's roast beef dinners. Sometimes the joint (heh - the beef ) would be a diferent cut, but it was always good.

Oh, my goodness, Lal! You make Tokien sound like a certain candy that a young wizard discovered once he learned there was more to the world than muggles!

Originally Posted by Lal

I don't need there to be any more, because I always find nourishment in what is already there. I like finding a passage I have read many times over and discovering that it leads me down a new path, whether about new ideas or about what other stories may lay behind it. I wonder if this is all part of the 'experience of story' as Bethberry has called it?

Possibly, for I think a good story first of all reaches out to give us experience about things we don't necessarily have or haven't faced directly in real life but which are nevertheless vital to our imaginative life. Like forests, lovely, dark and deep but usually we have miles to go before ....

And what is particularly attractive about the Professor's work is, as you say, that the river can ripple in so many different ways as it polishes our stoney minds. The Legendarium is not a closed system, as Mr. Underhill points out with his quotations from Tolkien's letters and Child with her very apt comparison to the Arthurian legends--although I'm not sure it is necessarily necessary to call Middle-earth 'true myth' for this to be so.

But isn't it the mark of the really astute performer to leave his audience always already wanting more? Or the fan dancer for that matter!