Post-grad, I’ve been trying to get myself back in the habit of reading for fun. My brain is phone-addled at this point, and after four years of translating reality into Twitter-style meme formats, it’s been refreshing and painful to read things that delay immediate dopamine satisfaction.
I recently read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. All three books were beautiful, J.R.R. Tolkien is a world-building genius, and overall, I greatly enjoyed the trilogy.
But reading the series at times felt like running with a small rock in my shoe. I’d ease into my stride, footsteps falling after one another, only to land in such a way the pebble is lodged in my heel. For the next half mile, all that’d be on my mind was that darn rock.
When you grow up in church circles, Tolkien is something you know even when you don’t. Your pastor will reference The Return of the King generously from the pulpit. Your cousins will make an elven waybread recipe they find on Pinterest. At some point, some teacher or youth group leader or professor will point to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’ circle of intellectuals to show that Christian scholarship can be more than just inside baseball.
This is all good, but reading the books, I’d find myself catapulted out of the narrative for the sake of some point. I’d ask myself, “Okay, well what does this represent?”
It no longer seemed important whether Frodo and Sam overcame what ailed them at that page, because there was some allegory that needed to be captured.
This difference gets a lot of air time in Continental philosophy. What’s different about being with the text versus stepping back and analyzing it. To illustrate this, Martin Heidegger tells of a professor approaching his lectern. When he considers it, does he think of its essence? How its various parts come together to be one?
No, the professor looks at it in “one fell swoop.” He thinks to himself, “Is it too tall for me?”
Because the professor is in the moment; he hasn’t created this artificial space between himself and the world around him.
I would’ve liked to read LOTR in one fell swoop, lost in the narrative for longer stretches. No blame lies with the author. Tolkien’s world is expansive and welcoming. There was ample opportunity to put myself aside and accompany the Fellowship on their quest.
But I’ve developed a stubborn reflex after all these years to sermonize LOTR, because that’s what people did when they talked about it. Expecting to find footnotes, I lost the plot.
This is not an “Evangelicals ruin everything” essay. My churchgoing friends and colleagues aren’t at fault either. They just got to read the books without analytical distance and used that wonder to look back and observe. I started with their observation, and it created distance from me and Middle-earth.
There’s a cartoon that makes it rounds on social media every so often. A man looks at some art and says, “Haha, what does this represent?”
The art points back angrily and demands, “What do YOU represent?”
The comic’s caption instructs the reader that she will get from art what she brings to it. I hope to bring someone better when I read LOTR again.
Juliana Knot graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in philosophy, mathematics, and German. She covers Southwest Michigan business and agriculture as a reporter for the Herald-Palladium.
1 Comment
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
When you’ve heard a book praised again and again, it’s incredibly hard to disentangle your own thoughts from all the voices in your head! Love the rock metaphor for this sort of situation—wanting to shut down the “critique” side of your brain and longing to just enjoy the experience, but not quite knowing how.