Dear Theophilus:: March 2003

Desiring Middle-Earth

Over the Christmas holidays I watched The Two Towers four times in one week. It took me back all over again. To keep the hurt at bay, I bought two Lord of the Rings calendars, listened constantly to the movie soundtrack, nightly read Tolkien commentary, talked Tolkien with anyone and everyone who was even remotely interested, and regularly surfed my many bookmarked Tolkien websites. But like any addiction, all this only made me want more. And worse still, I was plagued by the growing suspicion that at the age of 32, I was the same nerd who had first gotten lost in Middle-earth back in junior high school, the same geek who so empathized with Luke Skywalker as he looked off into the double sunset of Tatooine, longing for something more.

One popular Tolkien website took a survey asking readers to name the single strongest emotion they felt when they had finished reading The Lord of the Rings. The choices included longing, excitement, loss, disappointment, and indifference. Longing won out by a pretty wide margin. But despite more Tolkien analysis percolating on websites and magazines and sermons than I ever dreamed possible during the lean years, few speak of this emotional aftermath. My guess is that the subject is simply too embarrassing. So when I aimlessly picked up C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory only days after watching The Two Towers, I could not believe I had stumbled so serendipitously upon a kindred spirit. In this sermonette, Lewis not only deals directly with the subject of longing, but he even explains our embarrassment at talking about it: In speaking of this desire …I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you-the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret [] which pierces with such sweetness than when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. He could not have put it more perfectly.

I felt similarly when I recently re-watched Beautiful Girls. Although I love to tease men about their perennial obsession with physical beauty, Beautiful Girls actually makes me identify with this dirty-minded, lust-filled, commitment-shy group of men who, nearing the age of thirty, still plaster their walls with posters of half-dressed supermodels and are attracted to precocious thirteen-year-old girls. When Timothy Hutton's character, disenchanted with his not-happening musical career and bored with his 7.5-out-of-10 girlfriend, finds himself falling for his thirteen-year-old neighbor, he pines, I just want something beautiful. I wanted to shout at the screen, "I know exactly what you mean!"

A beautiful woman, the swell of a symphony, a starlit night, a heartbursting story of heroes and sacrifice: according to Lewis, these are only good images of what we truly desire; they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. And if we mistake them for the thing itself, they will turn into dumb idols and break our hearts. I should know about idolatrous worship and the heartbreak that ensues. Since I was a child I have always wanted something else, ached for some other place, longed for someone else. I thought it was adventure in a distant galaxy or Keanu Reeves as a boyfriend (for looking, not talking), and I am still rather convinced that it is adventure in Middle-earth that would be the answer to all my inexpressible longings. But Lewis claims that all along what I have really desired, without knowing it, was a Something, a Somewhere, a Someone: that all these other things were but the vehicles through which the true longing came to me, that what I have wanted all along, though I mistook it for many other things, was the Desire of the Ages Himself.

I think what convinces me most is Lewis' observation, so true in me, that the longing is accompanied by heartache, even when I have it. Any clear morning I wake early enough, I can see the Morning Star burning brilliantly in the darkness of the winter sky right above a neighbor's tree. It is mine to enjoy at leisure. God has already given it to me in a sense. But its beauty only makes me ache for something more. After countless readings and viewings and endless surfing and talking about Tolkien's world, I am hardly satisfied. In either case, I am but an outsider, a spectator with my face pressed up against the window, unable to participate in the wonders that I see. Lewis claims that this is because [a]t present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

Tolkien also knew this secret, even as he plodded on for more than twelve years trying to finish The Lord of the Rings. In his short story, Leaf by Niggle, a hauntingly revealing autobiographical allegory, we meet Niggle, an ineffectual sort of painter who is better at painting a leaf than he is at painting the entire tree. But one particular painting begins to bother him: it begins as a leaf caught in the wind and becomes a tree, thrusting out great branches and roots, and all about it an entire country begins to open out, snow-capped mountains off in the distance, great woods off to the side. Inspiration has landed in his lap, and he becomes obsessed with finishing this one painting before he has to make his journey (death). But he fails and is forced to take his journey before he finishes. After spending much time at the Workhouse (Purgatory) learning not to niggle, i.e., not to waste time and be ineffectual, Niggle finds himself in a great green land which he recognizes as his own painting, only it is real. His painting, he is told by a shepherd, was but a glimpse of the real thing-a glimpse for others to catch if they thought it worthwhile to try. Back at his old place, his painting is destroyed by those who want to put the canvas to more useful purposes, and only a fragment, a leaf, survives to haunt those who catch in it a glimpse of they know not what.

Thankfully Tolkien did finish his painting before his journey, and in Middle-earth I have glimpsed something that only fills me with greater longing for I know not what. But if Lewis and Tolkien are right, then one day, Lord willing, we will get in. We will wake up from this foggy dream called life and finally be home, finally see the Real Thing. We will not only be able to enjoy the Morning Star on an early winter's morning, but He will give it to us and clothe us in its beauty and splendor. And, best of all, we will see face to face He for whom we have been longing and aching all our lives, though we may not even have known it.