The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

      23 October 1944 (FS 57)

      I have just been out to look up: the noise is terrific: the biggest for a long time, skywide Armada. I suppose it is allright to say so, as by the time that this reaches you somewhere will have ceased to exist and all the world will have known about it and already forgotten it. . . . .

      There seems no time to do anything properly; and I feel tired all the time, or rather bored. I think if a jinn came and gave me a wish – what would you really like? – I should reply: Nothing. Go away!. . . .

      With regard to the blasphemy, one can only recall (when applicable) the words Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do – or say. And somehow I fancy that Our Lord actually is more pained by offences we commit against one another than those we commit against himself, esp. his incarnate person. And linguistically there is not a great deal of difference between a damn you, said without reflection or even knowledge of the terror and majesty of the One Judge, and the things you mention. Both the sexual and the sacred words have ceased to have any content except the ghost of past emotion. I don’t mean that it is not a bad thing, and it is certainly very wearisome, saddening and maddening, but it is at any rate not blasphemy in the full sense.

      87 To Christopher Tolkien

      25 October 1944

      20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

      Dearest man, Here is a little more of ‘the Ring’ for your delectation (I hope), and criticism, but not for return. Two more chapters to complete the ‘Fourth Book’, & then I hope to finish the ‘Fifth’ and last of the Ring. I have written a long airletter today, & shall write again (of course) before your birthday. I am afraid this little packet won’t get to you in time for it.

      ‘Dear Mr Tolkien, I have just finished reading your book The Hobbit for the 11th time and I want to tell you what I think of it. I think it is the most wonderful book I have ever read. It is beyond description … Gee Whiz, I’m surprised that it’s not more popular … If you have written any other books, would you please send me their names?’

      John Barrow 12 yrs.

      West town School, West town, Pa.’

      I thought these extracts from a letter I got yesterday would amuse you. I find these letters which I still occasionally get (apart from the smell of incense which fallen man can never quite fail to savour) make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop. God bless you beloved. Do you think ‘The Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?

      Your own Father.

      It’s nice to find that little American boys do really still say ‘Gee Whiz’.

      88 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien

      28 October 1944 (FS 58)

      This empty year is fading into a dull grey mournful darkness: so slow-footed and yet so swift and evanescent. What of the new year and the spring? I wonder.

      89 To Christopher Tolkien

      7–8 November 1944 (FS 60)

      20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

      . . . . Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that ‘he’ is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory’s before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore¹ was being held there. I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized. And I do not mean ‘personified’, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since – for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) – it has occurred to me that (I speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote) this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort, part of which took this curious form, which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light – though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others. . . . .

      On Sunday Prisca and I cycled in wind and rain to St Gregory’s. P. was battling with a cold and other disability, and it did not do her much immediate good, though she’s better now; but we had one of Fr. C’s best sermons (and longest). A wonderful commentary on the Gospel of the Sunday (healing of the woman and of Jairus’ daughter), made intensely vivid by his comparison of the three evangelists. (P. was espec. amused by his remark that St Luke being a doctor himself did not like the suggestion that the poor woman was all the worse for them, so he toned that bit down). And also by his vivid illustrations from modern miracles. The similar case of a woman similarly afflicted (owing to a vast uterine tumour) who was cured instantly at Lourdes, so that the tumour could not be found, and her belt was twice too large. And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who was not healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with 2 nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. ‘I want to go and talk to the little girl’ – in the same train there was a little girl who had been healed. And he got up and walked there and played with the little girl; and then he came back, and he said ‘I’m hungry now’. And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat. So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are. They are intrusions (as we say, erring) into real or ordinary life, but they do intrude into real life, and so need ordinary meals and other results. (Of course Fr. C could not resist adding: and there was also a Capuchin Friar who was mortally ill, & had eaten nothing for years, and he was cured, and he was so delighted about it that he rushed off and had two dinners, and that night he had not his old pains but an attack of plain ordinary indigestion). But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have – though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation. And all of a sudden I realized what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain – in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears СКАЧАТЬ