The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

by J.R.R. Tolkien

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Long after the details of the Council of Elrond had faded, long after the journey through the Mines of Moria had become hazy, long after I had stopped yearning for a taste of Lembas, this line stuck with me. I expect it will be there with me until the day I die. Lord of the Rings is about grand adventues and righteous wars, about the fate of empires and national myths. But it's also a book about the most intimate epic journey of them all: the passage of a single soul through this Middle-earth, through our mortal coil. We are born into this world naked and ignorant, as unformed as a lump of clay. Into this void appear our parents and teachers, who become our first angels and demons. They teach us the names of things and tell us our first stories—the personal mythology that will form the core of our being. The way they love us shapes the way we understand love and joy; the way they hurt us leaves us with scars that will inform how we endure and lash out. Later, as we gain companions and friends, we weave our stories together into a collective spell-tale of strength. Each of us is the hero of our own story, and each of us is also the loyal companion, the carefree forest spirit, the wise wizard, the insounciant rival, and even the despised villain, in someone else's story. Somewhere along the way, as we journey through life's dark wood, we find ourselves now the angels and demons in the stories of those who come after us, and the way we love them and hurt them will shape who they are as much as our predecessors shaped us. This is how we go on, generation after generation, our one and only life the grandest epic in the history of the universe. The most important part of this journey is the story we live through, construct, tell -- with the help of our friends, foes, and lovers. Do we know them half as well as we should like? Do we like them half as well as they deserve? These are questions worth asking ourselves, for in the end, it is fellowship that defines us, the web of many loves that sustains us on our journey into the eternal west.