Treebeard now knows what Saruman was after with all his questions; he wanted power—power here meaning domination and use: “he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” Intriguing, isn’t it, how the pursuit of a particular form of knowledge closes you off from the world outside your head? Saruman’s knowledge makes him machine-like, unfeeling and unaware of things outside himself. His knowledge is ignorant of the most important aspect of any given thing—what a thing is in itself.
