Tolkien & Lewis

[Belin]

In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Alas! They had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart’s best brother:
They parted—ne’er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;--
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

[img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]

Not that that explains anything really, but it’s such a brilliant description of it. In any case, it brings up another interesting point; literary friendships often go this way. Coleridge and Wordsworth had a falling-out as well, as did Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Perhaps it’s because the friendship is too much based on what they do have in common and their ability to give each other ideas and share intellectually? Over the course of intellectual development, it seems to me that people typically change much more radically than they do emotionally, or maybe it’s just that emotional development more easily accommodates itself to change, if the essential base of mutual caring remains unchanged.

Anyway, the intellectual distancing may be inevitable..... Keep in mind that Coleridge wrote these words BEFORE his fight with Wordsworth.

Wow... this thread is really getting me down.

--Belin Ibaimendi


(PS. By the way, are my constant outside literary references getting annoying to anybody? I hope not... I can try to stop if they are. I've actually just realized how often I do this.... I’m really not trying to be pretentious; connection is just the way my mind works.)

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: Belin ]