Change And Communication

[syncategorematic]

I cannot help but flatter athaira9 in the most sincere way available to me --- I too will post passages out of books I am reading that make me think.

Darn you, Splintered Light, you're one of those books when I am going, "Noo! This can't be it! This can't be the last chapter! Don't stop now! Waaant mooore!"

Two ideas crucial to Tolkien's philosophy emerge with increasing clarity as his mythology is studied. One is the inevitability and absolute necessity of change. The other is the centrality of language and its importance as both cause and result....One of the chief agents of change is language, altering and governing perception. Out of change comes new perception and hence new language. Language separates, divides, distinguishes, breaking down and refining aspects of original, undifferentiated reality.
...While Tolkien's psychological and emotional yearning was nostalgia for aspects of his world that had vanished or were vanishing in his lifetime, still, his philosophical and religious position was that change is necessary...."Mere change as such," he wrote of his invented world, "is not represented as 'evil'; it is the unfolding of the story and to refuse this is of course against the design of God. But the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change...They desired some power over things as they are...to arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair" (Letters 236)....However good the present may be or seem, however bad the future may look, the present is always passing, must become that which has passed, the past.
...Moreover, to try to arrest change is to stop as well that increase in perception that change must bring....If humankind, like Tolkien himself, like Frodo in "The Sea-bell", feels wounded, lost, bereft of paradise, and not yet in sight of heaven, then it follows that humankind is aware --- painfully aware, perhaps, but out of that awareness able to create.
(pp. 167-172)

And in a previous chapter there was more: 

If Fëanor cannot change the Music, if he is bound by it, how could a different answer have made his subsequent deeds "other than they were"?
...Subsequent events or deeds would not be externally different, but the motives behind them could be different, as could his attitudes toward himself, the Silmarils, and the peoples whose lives are intertwined with his....Tolkien has deliberately constructed a situation in which Fëanor's decision can alter nothing and no one but himself....Tolkien's purpose here is to show that free will is more important as a factor in external governance than as a determiner of external events. The Music will always have the same form, but how it is played (to extend the metaphor) whether fast or slow, presto or andante, is up to the performers. (pp.113-115)
Moreover, Fëanor is lacking in that very understanding which the loss of the Silmarils should have given him; understanding of how it feels to be deprived of one's most precious work. The contrast here is with Aulë, who, because he could give up his own creation, knew firsthand Fëanor's anguish and understood his hesitation. Because Fëanor could not relinquish his creation, his refusal has deadened his capacity to understand or care about the Teleri. (p.116)

I think that Tolkien, or Verlyn Flieger's interpretation of Tolkien, touches on my own ideas of how fate and free will intersect and work out in our lives, in the music that we play. Although I am not sure how to put that coherently at this time, so I am just going to put quotations up for now.

Comments

[athaira9.livejournal.com]

:)
This is interesting. I need to think on that.
Can I borrow that book sometime?

[indicolite.livejournal.com]

I was going to offer it to you when we meet on Monday --- but I want it back! :) It is teh awesome, one of those books that comes along at just the right time of someone's psychosocial development.

And I think "The other day I swapped two bottles of perfume for a book on Tolkien's linguistics" is a great line.

[athaira9.livejournal.com]

sweet. thanks.
And, yes, it is a very good line.