Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 218

on social acceleration

Recently I’ve read two of the most stimulating, provocative, generative books I’ve read in a long time. One of them is Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. I hope to have something to say about that in the near future.

The other, and the one I want to talk about here, is Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration. This one poses some real challenges to me, primarily because it bears so directly on the book I’m writing but is not the sort of thing — it gets deep into the weeds of social theory — that I can treat at length in a book for a general audience. So as relevant as it is to the argument of Breaking Bread with the Dead, I won’t say much about it there, though it will surely end up in the notes a few times. (One of the things I most want to do in my writing for general audiences is to translate complex work in theology, philosophy, and social, cultural, and literary theory into terms accessible to the common reader — and to do so without defacing the ideas by oversimplifying them.) 

I’ll unpack a bit of Rosa’s argument here, then. Rosa looks at the phenomenon of acceleration in three dimensions:

“technical acceleration, that is, the intentional acceleration of goal-directed processes”; 
“acceleration of social change, that is, the escalation of the rate of social change with respect to associational structures, knowledge (theoretical, practical, and moral), social practices, and action orientations”; 
“acceleration of the pace of life represents a reaction to the scarcity of (uncommitted) time resources. This is why, on the one hand, it is expressed in the experience of stress and a lack of time, and, on the other, it can be defined as an increase in the number of episodes of action and/or experience per unit of time.”

The relationship between these three dimensions, Rosa shows, is complex: after all, when you have technical acceleration, especially in the form of what we call “labor-saving devices,” shouldn’t our pace of life slow down? And yet it often doesn’t — or, perhaps more accurately, we don’t feel that it does.

Rosa also discusses various “decelerating” forces or institutions, and it’s the last of those that I want to focus on here. Unlike the deceleration of a technologically backward society with scant or no access to the most current technologies — and also unlike the deliberate choice, long term or short, of technological limitation (the family living “off the grid” or the techbro vacationing in a monastery) — this final kind of deceleration is “the paradoxical flip side of social acceleration.” Many people in our time have “the experience of an uneventfulness and standstill that underlies the rapidly changing surface of social conditions and events, one that accompanies the modern perception of dynamization from the very beginning as a second fundamental experience of modernization.” Rosa often uses in the book a phrase by the cultural theorist Paul Virilio: “frenetic standstill” — the widespread sense that the world around us is in constant flux and yet nothing essential is happening — nothing essential can happen. (There’s a fascinating section of the book on the ways that depression is a natural response to this and therefore the characteristic disease of late modernity.) 

This sense of “frenetic standstill” is especially common when the second dimension, acceleration of social change, crosses a certain threshold. Rosa looks at three social conditions, divided by two thresholds. In the first condition no obviously major change happens over several generations, or if it does happen it happens with imperceptible slowness, which lends to everyone in that society a feeling of stability, even permanence. Thus it was, thus it is, thus it shall ever be.

But when a major change occurs fast enough so that one generation of people can see that they’re living in a different form of life than their parents, or grandparents, did, then a threshold has been crossed. And Rosa argues that when this happens people tend to perceive that change as progressive: the world is going somewhere, it has a direction, and if I go with it my life can have a progressive direction too.

However: there’s another threshold to cross, as we have recently learned, and that’s when significant social change happens within a generation. Not only is your social world different than the one your parents experienced and came to count on, it’s different than the social world you experienced even a short time ago. When that happens, you see a couple getting a divorce because when they married they were “different people.” You get Farhad Manjoo feeling that the gender that he absolutely took for granted just a few years ago is now an “ubiquitous prison for the mind.” You get a Christian academic like David Gushee making a career of chastising people for holding views he himself held quite recently. And everyone thinks this kind of thing is normal: to look upon your very self of five years ago as a stranger, and presumably one for whose beliefs and actions your NowSelf cannot possibly be held responsible.

But, Rosa reminds us, we don’t really how what life on this side of that second threshold is going to do to us.

An intragenerational tempo of change thus undeniably raises the question of the temporally specific, so to speak, load-bearing capacity of cultural reproduction and social integration. The consequences of the growing intergenerational divide in lifeworld orientations and everyday practices as well as the ongoing devaluation of experience for the exchange between generations, for the passing on of cultural knowledge, and for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity have hardly been studied at all.

It hasn’t been studied, but the consequences are going to be interesting (and, I think, not pleasant) to see unfold. For instance, here’s one aspect of the “ongoing devaluation of experience for the exchange between generations, for the passing on of cultural knowledge, and for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity”: a currently small but increasing number of parents live in absolute terror of “assigning” gender to their children. Some decades from now there will surely be some powerfully embittered people who will despise their parents for having forced such choices on them when they were wholly unprepared to make them.

And yet many of those same parents don’t hesitate to forbid the eating of meat or Twinkies or Doritos to those same children, and will be deeply grieved when, as is inevitable, some of those kids end up as junk-food junkies. So I don’t think there will ever be a wolesale abandonment of “the passing on of cultural knowledge,” or of a desire for “the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity.” But what, specifically, people will want to pass down to their children will change. And there’s no doubt that as long as social change happens, or is felt to, at the current rate, parents will want to give their children free choices as often as they can possibly bear to. The “load-bearing capacity of cultural reproduction and social integration” will continue to decline, it seems likely. 

And yet maybe not inevitable. There’s a passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia that I think of often — and that Rosa refers briefly to at one point: “Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.”

bookmaking

After writing my recent post on my enthusiasm for the writing of C. V. Wedgwood, I realized that I didn’t have a copy of her brief biography of Oliver Cromwell, so I ordered one from AbeBooks. It duly arrived, and I have just read it, and can report that it’s fine but by no means one of her best works. But I find myself thinking about the actual physical book, the codex. 

It’s a discarded library book — from Stephens College in Missouri — and was acquired by that library in 1956. It’s a small book (4.5 x 7.5 inches) and has a basic, unadorned cover, and when I first opened the book I thought that the paper wasn’t great. But then I realized that the paper is sixty-three years old, and in that context it’s pretty darn good. It hasn’t yellowed much, and isn’t as brittle as paper that age often is. The binding is sewn, and the book easily lies flat. 

Though the book, as you can see, was published by a New York house, it was actually printed in England. 

The Jarrold Group sold their printing business around fifteen years ago, after which it seems to have closed, leaving only a small and rarely open museum of printing. 

But in their day they knew their craft. It’s the typography that really struck me, even though it’s not unusual or obviously distinctive. Here’s a sample page: 

As I say, not dramatic — but look at how lovely all the proportions are: the layout on the page, the spacing and kerning, the simple but elegant (and highly readable) typeface — Baskerville, I think — you can’t go wrong with Baskerville. It’s very rare for a book to get almost every element of typesetting and layout right the way this one does. (The kerning might be a tiny bit wide at times, but that’s because the book is small and the lines are therefore short. The compositors have done very well to make you forget about that.) 

Consider this recent and nicely-designed book, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: 

Now that’s a lovely typeface — Minion, I think? I’m not expert in these things — and note the generous spacing between lines: important when a book is as big as this one (over 600 pages). But the margins are too narrow. Look how the ends of the lines disappear into the gutter. I think with slightly wider margins and slightly narrower spacing between the lines the book could have been more readable at the same length. (Though, as you can see, the paper is too thin. Compare the older book, in which nothing shows through from the other side.) 

Obviously, every typesetting decision creates tradeoffs: you get a good feature in exchange for putting up with something a little less good. It’s like working with a stringed instrument: something is always out of tune, at least a little, thanks to the perversities of equal temperament. But those bookmaking people at Jarrold & Sons did the job about as well as it can be done. Hats off to them. I wish I could buy new books made by them, or by craftsmen who can do what they could do. 

the most literary decade

Popular radio shows featured literary critics talking about recent poetry and fiction. The New Yorker’s book-review editor hosted one of the most popular radio shows in America, and his anthology, Reading I’ve Liked, ranked seventh on the bestseller list for nonfiction in 1941. At the Democratic Primary Convention in 1948, F. O. Matthiessen, a professor of American literature, delivered a nominating speech for Henry Wallace, the late FDR’s vice president. Writers were celebrities. Literature was popular. The 1940s was the most intensely literary decade in American history, perhaps in world history. Books symbolized freedom.

Posters of 1942 quoted the president: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons.” During the Blitz, Muriel Rukeyser recalled, “newspapers in America carried full-page advertisements for The Oxford Book of English Verse, announced as ‘all that is imperishable of England.’ ” For the first and only time in history, protecting books in war zones became an official aim of armed forces.

— George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. Compare the argument I made in my essay “The Watchmen.”

neighbors

When I awoke I could barely move for the pain; I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know how I had gotten there. I could hear, from some nearby room, laughter and conversation. Eventually a woman came to my door and asked how I was doing.

“Who are you?” I managed to ask, though it hurt me to speak. I could feel with my tongue that I had lost teeth, and I could see through one eye only. Every breath made my ribs ache.

“My husband and I keep this inn,” she said, and then she told me about the man who had found me and brought me to safety. When I arrived, she said, the stranger had already washed me as best he could and bandaged the worst of my wounds. He gave them money to take care of me. “And we will do right by you,” she said. “He promised that when he comes this way again he’ll pay us for any added expense. So you just rest up, and I’ll bring you some soup. You won’t be going anywhere for a few days.” And then as she was leaving she looked back and said, “He was a Samaritan, you know.”

Now that’s odd, I thought as I lay back and tried to breathe without hurting myself. I didn’t, and don’t, remember the man at all — I didn’t, and don’t, remember anything after the moment the first blow from the robbers knocked me to the ground. They’re wicked men, of course, but I should’ve known better than to take that road at that time of night. I was trying to save time; I was in a hurry to get some business done. I was a fool.

But to think that a stranger passing by, and a Samaritan at that, stopped to care for me! — what an encouragement. It makes me think that all these years I’ve been too cynical about people. Sure, there are some bad ones in the world — don’t I know it! — but in the end, surely, human nature is essentially good. I must remember that.

the greatest of the Wedgwoods

National Portrait Gallery

Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910–1997) was the most distinguished of the Wedgwoods — with the possible exception of her great-great-great grandfather Josiah. In the estimation of Anthony Grafton — himself one of the most distinguished historians of our time — she is “the greatest narrative historian of the twentieth century.” And that counts for a lot, in my book.

By the adjective “narrative” Grafton means to distinguish Wedgwood’s way of writing history from what has become the standard academic one, which is less concerned with telling a story than providing an analytical and often data-driven framework for understanding historical events and patterns. That model has become sufficiently dominant that most of us these days think of the writing of history as something very different than the writing of “literature,” but ’twas not always so. When Gibbon wrote his great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he was understood to be just as literary as Alexander Pope or Henry Fielding (probably more so than Fielding). In the next century Lord Macaulay’s History of England was every bit as literary as his Lays of Ancient Rome. George Steiner, writing decades ago, understood that Wedgwood was working in this tradition, and celebrates it even as he denounces what has replaced it:

The ambitions of scientific rigour and prophecy have seduced much historical writing from its veritable nature, which is art. Much of what passes for history at present is scarcely literate…. The illusion of science and the fashions of the academic tend to transform the young historian into a ferret gnawing at the minute fact or figure. He dwells in footnotes and writes monographs in as illiterate a style as possible to demonstrate the scientific bias of his craft. One of the few contemporary historians prepared to defend openly the poetic nature of all historical imagining is C. V. Wedgwood. She fully concedes that all style brings with it the possibility of distortion: ‘There is no literary style which may not at some point take away something from the ascertainable outline of truth, which it is the task of scholarship to excavate and re-establish.’ But where such excavation abandons style altogether, or harbours the illusion of impartial exactitude, it will light only on dust.

“The poetic nature of all historical imagining” — preach it, sir! But few historians today, even those rare birds who even make an effort to tell a good story, can hold a candle to Wedgwood. Peter Ackroyd, for instance, who has shifted from being primarily a novelist to being primarily a historian, presumably because of his skills at narration, is a mechanical plodder in comparison to Wedgwood. (And he’s getting worse. His ongoing history of England is coma-inducing.)

Wedgwood didn’t describe what she did as more literary or artful than the work of academic historians, even though, of course, it is. Here’s how she understood her work:

The application of modern methods of research, together with modern knowledge and prejudice, can make the past merely the subject of our own analytical ingenuity or our own illusions. With scholarly precision we can build up theories as to why and how things happened which are convincing to us, which may even be true, but which those who live through the epoch would neither recognize nor accept. It is legitimate for the historian to pierce the surface and bring to light to motives and influences not known at the time; but it is equally legitimate to accept the motives and explanations which satisfied contemporaries…. This book is not a defence of one side [in the English Civil War] or the other, not an economic analysis, not a social study; it is an attempt to understand how these men felt and why, in their own estimation, they acted as they did.

That from the Introduction to The King’s Peace, the first volume of her history of the fall of King Charles I. This interest in representing people and events by employing categories that they themselves would have recognized may be seen in this brilliant brief portrait of Charles:

He had never had the painful experience from which his father, as a young man, had learned so much; he had never confronted insolent opponents face-to-face and had the worst of the argument. No national danger had compelled him to go out among his people and share their perils. He was, at this time, not only the most formal but the most remote and sheltered of all European kings.

Less virtuous monarchs escaped from formality in the arms of lowborn mistresses, but for the chaste Charles, no Nell Gwynne, prattling cockney anecdotes, opened a window into the lives of his humbler subjects. Like many shy, meticulous men, he was fond of aphorisms, and would write in the margins of books, in a delicate, beautiful, deliberate script, such maxims as “Few great talkers are great doers” or “None but cowards are cruel.” He trusted more to such distilled and bottled essence of other man’s wisdom than to his own experience, which was, in truth, limited; his daily contact with the world was confined within the artificial circle of his Court and the hunting field. He was to say, much later, in tragic circumstances, that he knew as much law as any gentleman in England. It was true; but he had little conception of what the laws meant to those who lived under them.

That last sentence is simply devastating. (Whenever Wedgood pauses in her narrative for a character sketch of one of her actors, you are always in for something superb.)

Wedgwood pauses from time to time in The King’s Peace, especially in its early pages, to sketch not personalities but social orders and patterns and beliefs, including the experiences of those very people whom Charles never knew. Here’s a sample:

In the wilds of Lochaber from time to time a green man could be seen, one that had been killed between daylight and starlight and belonged neither to earth nor heaven. Some thought these apparitions were only the unhappy dead but others thought them one of the many forms taken by the devil. The strong forces of nature, with the advent of Christianity, had become confused with the devil, and after the lapse of centuries witchcraft had become indivisibly compact of pagan and Christian beliefs. The devil, in many forms, bestrode the islands from end to end. Sometimes he was “a proper gentleman with a laced band,” as when he came to Elizabeth Clarke at Chelmsford; at other times you might know him, as Rebecca Jones of St. Osyth did, by his great glaring eyes. He was cold and sensual and rather mean: he offered Priscilla Collit of Dunwich only ten shillings for her immortal soul; she gave it to him and off he went without paying. Respectably dressed in “brown clothes and a little black hat,” he spoke in friendly terms to Margaret Duchill of Alloa in Scotland; “Maggie, will you be my servant?” he asked, and when she agreed he told her to call him John and gave her five shillings and powers of life and death over her neighbours.

I could quote paragraph after paragraph, page after page, of this kind of thing. And her ability to immerse you in a battle, or a court scene, or a back-room political argument, is unexcelled. Moreover, all this is based (as Grafton notes) on exceptionally thorough archival research, sometimes in multiple languages. I am writing a book that attempts to convince people that the past can be, and should be, a living world to us. That case would be much easier to make if there were more historians like C. V. Wedgwood.

She should be remembered as one of the best storytellers writing in English in the twentieth century. And yet her major works — with the sole exception of the early but masterful history of the Thirty Years War — are out of print. That is a travesty.

Editors! Publishers! Let’s redress this injustice. If you need someone to edit and/or write an introduction to a new edition of Wedgwood’s work, just call on me. I am here for you.

And readers! You can of course start with The Thirty Years War, which is as good as advertised. But I prefer her work on English history. For those, AbeBooks is your friend. If you’re not sure you want to commit to one of the big books, her third volume on the English Civil War, A Coffin for King Charles, works perfectly well as an independent story and comes in at around 250 pages. It is absolutely riveting.

this is your mind on presentism

As a person writing a book about the need to cultivate temporal bandwidth, I am so pleased when various prominent cultural outlets do advance publicity on my behalf. Consider for instance this piece in the New Yorker on the decline in the study of history:

“Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but are we educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life,” Blight told me. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo … can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” he wrote. A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos. As he has proved ever since he rode to political prominence on the lie of Barack Obama’s birthplace, Trump is all three. And, without more history majors, we are doomed to repeat him.

I would give a big Amen to this but with one caveat: it’s not more history majors we need, it’s a more general, more widespread, acquaintance with history. Without that we are fully at the mercy of our now-habitual and increasingly tyrannical presentism.

Consider, as an exemplum, this Farhad Manjoo column, in which he deplores the “prison” of being referred to by gendered pronouns. Damon Linker’s response zeroes in on a key point:

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That’s more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn’t even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which (“the gender binary”) go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

I think Linker could have, with equal appositeness, referred to 2014: If you got in a time machine and showed the Farhad Manjoo of 2014 a copy of his 2019 column, he almost certainly would not believe that he had written it. A stance that in 2014 was been so uncontroversial that it didn’t rise to the level of consciousness — that it’s okay for us to refer to ourselves by gendered pronouns — is now the unmistakable sign of “a ubiquitous prison for the mind.” And yet so thoroughly is Manjoo immersed in the imperatives of the moment that he’s not even aware of the discontinuity. That is the real prison for the mind.

Jamesian aphasia

I’m reading Henry James’s late unfinished novel The Sense of the Past for the book I’m writing, and while my opinion of Henry James as a writer is not relevant to my use of his story, I just want to go on record saying that there is no writer who frustrates me more than Henry James in his later period. I find Joyce’s Ulysses – dammit, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – easier to read and to make sense of than the prose of Henry James in his later period. When I read one of James’s sentences I often feel that it was created by an algorithm that has been fed a list of English words classified by part of speech and an extensive set of grammatical rules — but has been given no information about what the words mean. Here is a representative — note: representative, not unusual, not exaggerated — sentence from The Sense of the Past: “Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted.“ Just for fun, here’s another one: “He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.” I read sentences like these and think I’m developing some rare and deadly form of aphasia.

this sickness is not unto death

People ask me about it all the time, but I have nothing to tell them. I was very ill; I closed my eyes and drifted away; I woke to the call of a friend’s voice, and when I realized I was bound in cloth all over — that was terrible — I flailed and rose and stumbled towards the voice. That’s all.

I hear that he told people that I was asleep, just asleep. Mary and Martha say that I was not, that he was using a figure of speech, as we do when we say that King David slept with his fathers. Maybe. But he said what he said.

Nothing much happened to me after that. When he returned to our house he was occupied by some kind of dispute involving Mary and Judas, which I had no part in. And soon thereafter he did what he came to do. Much later I was told that the chief priests who sought to kill him wanted to kill me as well, though I don’t know why, and in any case I was unaware of it at the time.

I was unaware of a lot in those days. My sisters tell me that I was preoccupied, distant. I suppose I was. Though as far as I knew I had simply slept for a few days, I had to learn again how to live in the light. Plus, I knew what was coming for our friend. It was hard to know how to speak to him then.

He was our friend. We know he loved us, as we loved him. But as his hour drew near, he seemed preoccupied with those who followed him everywhere he went. (We just stayed in Bethany.) I guess he had much to teach them and little time to do it. But when he came back — and I know he came back — he had time for them only. No time for us.

I guess what I’m saying is, no time for me. I kept thinking, We have something in common now. But maybe we don’t. Maybe his three days were wholly unlike my four. Maybe they didn’t involve sleep, weren’t like sleep. But whatever that experience was for him, I know this: he won’t have to do it again.

Sometimes I pass the tomb where I spent those four days I don’t remember. I’m generally not superstitious, but I don’t look too closely; and I certainly don’t go in. But one day I will. And what that will be like for me I don’t know any more than you do.

Chapter 43

The old man sat on his porch and looked out across the green fields. Another good harvest coming this fall. And the sun shone on the glossy coats of the fat cattle.

One of his grandchildren came out and handed him a mug of mint tea. He grasped it with both hands and its warmth soothed his fingers’ joints. He looked at his granddaughter and saw her round smooth arms, the bright whites of her long-lashed eyes, her smiling lips. He drew her near and kissed the top of her head, smelling her clean fresh hair. He rejoiced in her rude health. He gave thanks for it.

A year ago a stranger had visited, drawn by his fame, and had asked, nervously, whether it was true what people said, that his sons and daughters had never died but rather had been protected by Hashem, set aside until the temptation was over, then restored to full life and health.

“No,” he had told the stranger. “No, it wasn’t like that.”

Unscoured

Frodo and his friends knew that the Shire would be changed, but they were not prepared for how radical the change would be. They had not been gone very long, really, but it might as well have been decades, so thoroughly had Sharkey reshaped the entire social order.

At first they were sure that if they but sounded the call the hobbits of the Shire would rise up against the tyranny that Sharkey had subjected them to. But soon enough they discovered that few saw the matter in precisely that light. It was indeed, the hobbits of the Shire thought, a shame what had been done to Bagshot Row — and not just to Bagshot Row: many other old edifices had been demolished, and fields paved over, replaced by factories. But for those who previously had gotten by with a series of odd jobs and seasonal employment, the regularity of factory work had a certain appeal. And the more accustomed hobbits became to a predictable daily schedule, the more daunting seemed the very idea of going back to a less structured, if more independent, way of life.

Moreover, some of the factories were devoted to supplying the parts for the Great Fence Sharkey had pledged to build around the whole perimeter of the Shire, which in these frightening days — Sharkey had started a newspaper, edited by Wormtongue, which kept the hobbits well informed about just how terrible things could be beyond their borders — was reassuring. And the building of the fence provided many good jobs. Some hobbits were now wealthier than they had ever dreamed possible.

The hobbits of the Shire had less time now to grow their vegetables and raise their animals, of course, but, in compensation, more and more inns opened to serve them prepared meals. And while the beer at some of the inns was not as good as it had been in the old days, at others it was better, because they all served the same beer now, so you always knew what it was going to taste like. Sharkey saw to that. There were few surprises any more — few for good, perhaps, but also, and surely more important, few for ill.

The returning hobbits weren’t sure what to do about all this. It quickly became clear to them that any rebellion they staged would get some distant sympathy, perhaps, but no real support. They could even find themselves locked up — though the more they talked it over the less likely they thought that would be. Why make martyrs of them, Sharkey probably thought, when he could make them nonentities?

They seemed to be faced with two choices. One was to stay in Hobbiton or one of the other towns, and try gradually to build up resistance among the people – to remind the hobbits of what they had once had, to remind them that ease and comfort and facility are not everything. The success of such an endeavor would depend on Sharkey’s willingness to tolerate dissent, which would be inversely proportionate to the popularity of that dissent among the rank and file of hobbits. But in no case would he allow any of the hobbits returning from the great War to tell their stories in his newspaper.

The other possibility was the one that Frodo chose. The house at the edge of the Old Forest still stood, was still isolated; no one came that way nor was likely to. Frodo could plant a garden. And then he could sit in his study and write his book.

Sam did not come to live with Frodo, nor did Frodo want him to. He knew it would be best for Sam to stay in Bywater and work at the rebuilt Green Dragon, because Rosie Cotton worked there too, so he hired Fatty Bolger — who needed anyhow to keep a low profile — as his general factotum. But on his rare days off Sam would come visit and they would sit over a pot of tea and talk about old things and new.

Chiefly Frodo wanted news of Merry and Pippin. Sam told him that Pippin was all for revolution, now — but Merry counseled patience, and the long slow work of winning over the people. Which meant, at first, trying to get them to understand that they couldn’t believe what they read in Wormtongue’s newspaper. “If only the King would come,” mused Pippin, “to set it all right,” but Merry thought that that was their job — not quite the job they had expected it to be when they made their way back from Mordor, but still. “Could the King get through Sharkey’s Fence?” Merry asked with a smile. “If he wanted to,” Pippin replied.

So Sam told Frodo. The hour grew late and it was time for him to make his way back to Bywater, so after embracing his old master and forever friend he set off down the road. As he was passing through an open meadow his hand drifted to his pocket, where a little silver nut lay — the one given him by the Lady. He had thought to plant it in the Party Field, but what had been the Party Field was a construction site now. As good here as anywhere, he thought, and dug a hole, and dropped in the nut. I wonder what will come of it. Or if anyone will see it.

In the house at the edge of the Old Forest, Fatty straightened up the rooms and washed the dishes. Frodo drifted back to his study and sat at his desk, the Red Book open before him. There were important stories to be told. Maybe someday they would find a ready audience.