By increasing our personal density we also increase our power to make genuine promises—and, as the writer Francis Spufford has said, “You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”* In making those promises, we take a step toward giving those who come after us clean earth to till. I am quoting the wizard Gandalf there, who says to his colleagues, “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after
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