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November 29, 2020 - November 24, 2023
“We have made you a creature neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”
Tolkien and Lewis were part of a generation of Britons who equated their nation’s growth and prosperity with the progress of civilization itself.
The act of “bulldozing the real world,” Tolkien wrote, involves “coercing other wills.”
“There are times when I wonder if the invention of the internal combustion engine was not an even greater disaster than that of the hydrogen bomb!”
“You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.”
Rather, evil existed as a darkness in the soul of every human being and as a tangible, spiritual force in the world.
“If anguish were visible,” Tolkien once explained, “almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!”
hard. “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
“All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired.
“Well, sir,” said the Cabby very slowly, “a chap don’t exactly know till he’s been tried. I dare say I might turn out ever such a soft ’un. Never did no fighting except with my fists. I’d try—that is, I ’ope I’d try—to do my bit.” “Then,” said Aslan, “you will have done all that a King should do.”
Eugenics, communism, fascism, Nazism: these were the revolutions and ideologies that arose in the exhaustion of the democracies of Europe, all in the name of advancing the human race. All began by promising liberation from oppression; all became instruments of totalitarian control.
Near the moral center of The Lord of the Rings is the ancient problem of the Will to Power: the universal temptation to exploit, dominate, and control the lives of others.
Letters. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. . . . But for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.
