I have been wondering for some time now how to talk about
the weirdly autumnal note that sounds so often and so clearly in America these
days. Through the babble and clatter, the seven or eight television screens
yelling from the walls of every restaurant you pass and all the rest of it,
there comes a tone and a mood that reminds me of wind among bare branches and
dry leaves crackling underfoot: as
though even the people who insist most loudly that it’s all onward and upward
from here don’t believe it any more, and those for whom the old optimism
stopped being more than a soothing shibboleth a long time ago are hunching
their shoulders, shutting their eyes tight, and hoping that things can still
hold together for just a little while longer.
It’s not just that American politicians and pundits are
insisting at the top of their lungs that the United States can
threaten Russia with natural gas surpluses that don’t exist, though
that’s admittedly a very bad sign all by itself. It’s that this orgy of
self-congratulatory nonsense appears in the news right next to reports that oil
and gas companies are slashing their investments in the fracking technology and
shale leases that were supposed to produce those imaginary surpluses, having
lost a great deal of money pursuing the shale oil mirage, while Russia and Iran
pursue
a trade deal that will make US sanctions against Iran all but irrelevant, and
China is
quietly making arrangements to conduct its trade with Europe in yuan rather than
dollars. Strong nations in control of their own destinies, it’s fair
to note, don’t respond to challenges on this scale by plunging their heads
quite so enthusiastically into the sands of self-deception.
To shift temporal metaphors a bit, the long day of national
delusion that dawned back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan famously and fatuously
proclaimed “it’s morning in America,” is drawing on rapidly toward dusk, and
most Americans are hopelessly unprepared for the coming of night. They’re unprepared in practical terms, that
is, for an era in which the five per cent of us who live in the United States
will no longer dispose of a quarter of the world’s energy supply and a third of
its raw materials and industrial products, and in which what currently counts
as a normal American lifestyle will soon be no more than a fading memory for
the vast majority. They’re just as
unprepared, though, for the
psychological and emotional costs of that shattering transformation—not least
because the change isn’t being imposed on them at random by an indifferent
universe, but comes as the inevitable consequence of their own collective
choices in decades not that long past.
The hard fact that most people in this country are trying
not to remember is this: in the years
right after Reagan’s election, a vast number of Americans enthusiastically
turned their backs on the promising steps toward sustainability that had been
taken in the previous decade, abandoned the ideals they’d been praising to the
skies up to that time, and cashed in their grandchildrens’ future so that they
didn’t have to give up the extravagance and waste that defined their familiar
and comfortable lifestyles. As a direct result, the nonrenewable resources that
might have supported the transition to a sustainable future went instead to
fuel one last orgy of wretched excess.
Now, though, the party is over, the bill is due, and the consequences of
that disastrous decision have become a massive though almost wholly unmentionable
factor in our nation’s culture and collective psychology.
A great many of the more disturbing features of contemporary
American life, I’m convinced, can’t be understood unless America’s thirty-year
vacation from reality is taken into account. A sixth of the US population is
currently on antidepressant medications, and since maybe half of Americans
can’t afford to get medication at all, the total number of Americans who are
clinically depressed is likely a good deal higher than prescription figures
suggest. The sort of bizarre delusions that used to count as evidence of
serious mental illness—baroque conspiracy theories thickly frosted with shrill
claims of persecution, fantasies of imminent mass death as punishment for
humanity’s sins, and so on—have become part of the common currency of American
folk belief. For that matter, what does our pop culture’s frankly necrophiliac
obsession with vampires amount to but an attempt, thinly veiled in the most
transparent of symbolism, to insist that it really is okay to victimize future
generations for centuries down the line in order to prolong one’s own
existence?
Mythic and legends such as this can be remarkably subtle
barometers of the collective psyche. The transformation that turned the vampire
from just another spooky Eastern European folktale into a massive pop culture
presence in industrial North America has quite a bit to say about the unspoken
ideas and emotions moving through the crawlspaces of our collective life. In
the same way, it’s anything but an accident that the myth of the heroic quest
has become so pervasive a presence in the modern industrial world that Joseph
Campbell could simply label it “the monomyth,” the basic form of myth as such.
In any sense other than a wholly parochial one, of course, he was quite
wrong—the wild diversity of the world’s mythic stories can’t be forced into any
one narrative pattern—but if we look only at popular culture in the modern
industrial world, he’s almost right.
The story of the callow nobody who answers the call to
adventure, goes off into the unknown, accomplishes some grand task, and returns
transformed, to transform his surroundings in turn, is firmly welded into place
in the imagination of our age. You’ll find it at the center of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
great works of fantasy, in the most forgettable
products of the modern entertainment industry, and everything in between and
all around. Yet there’s a curious blind spot in all this: we hear plenty about
those who answer the call to adventure, and nothing at all about those who
refuse it. Those latter don’t offer much of a plot engine for an adventure
story, granted, but such a tale could make for a gripping psychological
study—and one that has some uncomfortably familiar features.
With that in mind, with an apology in the direction of Tolkien’s
ghost, and with another to those of my readers who aren’t lifelong Tolkien
buffs with a head full of Middle-earth trivia—yes, I used to sign school
yearbooks in fluent Elvish—I’d like to suggest a brief visit to an alternate
Middle-earth: one in which Frodo
Baggins, facing the final crisis of the Third Age and the need to leave behind
everything he knew and loved in order to take the Ring to Mount Doom, crumpled
instead, with a cry of “I can’t, Gandalf, I just can’t.” Perhaps you’ll join me
in a quiet corner of The Green Dragon, the best inn in Bywater, take a mug of
ale from the buxom hobbit barmaid, and talk about old Frodo, who lived until
recently just up the road and across the bridge in Hobbiton.
You’ve heard about the magic ring he had, the one that he
inherited from his uncle Bilbo, the one that Gandalf the wizard wanted him to
go off and destroy? That was thirty years ago, and most folk in the Shire have
heard rumors about it by now. Yes, it’s quite true; Frodo was supposed to leave
the Shire and go off on an adventure, as Bilbo did before him, and couldn’t
bring himself to do it. He had plenty of reasons to stay home, to be sure. He was tolerably well off and quite
comfortable, all his friends and connections were here, and the journey would
have been difficult and dangerous. Nor was there any certainty of success—quite
the contrary, it’s entirely possible that he might have perished somewhere in
the wild lands, or been caught by the Dark Lord’s servants, or what have you.
So he refused, and when Gandalf tried to talk to him about
it, he threw the old wizard out of Bag End and slammed the round green door in
his face. Have you ever seen someone in a fight who knows that he’s in the
wrong, and knows that everyone else knows it, and that knowledge just makes him
even more angry and stubborn? That was
Frodo just then. Friends of mine watched the whole thing, or as much of it as
could be seen from the garden outside, and it was not a pleasant spectacle.
It’s what happened thereafter, though, that bears recalling.
I’m quite sure that if Frodo had shown the least sign of leaving the Shire and
going on the quest, Sauron would have sent Black Riders after him in a fine
hurry, and there’s no telling what else might have come boiling up out of Mordor. It’s by no means impossible that the Dark
Lord might have panicked, and launched a hasty, ill-advised assault on Gondor
right away. For all I know, that may have been what Gandalf had in mind,
tricking the Dark Lord into overreacting before he’d gathered his full
strength, and before Gondor and Rohan had been thoroughly weakened from within.
Still, once Sauron’s spies brought him word that Frodo had
refused to embark on the quest, the Dark Lord knew that he had a good deal less
to fear, and that he could afford to take his time. Ever since then, there have
been plenty of servants of Mordor in and around the Shire, and a Black Rider or
two keeping watch nearby, but nothing obvious or direct, nothing that might
rouse whatever courage Frodo might have had left or convince him that he had to flee for his
life. Sauron was willing to be patient—patient and cruel. I’m quite sure he
knew perfectly well what the rest of Frodo’s life would be like.
So Gandalf went away, and Frodo stayed in Bag End, and for
years thereafter it seemed as though the whole business had been no more than a
mistake. The news that came up the Greenway from the southern lands was no
worse than before; Gondor still stood firm, and though there was said to be
some kind of trouble in Rohan, well, that was only to be expected now and
then. Frodo even took to joking about
how gullible he’d been to believe all those alarmist claims that Gandalf had
made. Sauron was still safely cooped up in Mordor, and all seemed right with
Middle-earth.
Of course part of that was simply that Frodo had gotten even
wealthier and more comfortable than he’d been before. He patched up his
relationship with the Sackville-Bagginses, and he invested a good deal of his
money in Sandyman’s mill in Hobbiton, which paid off handsomely. He no longer
spent time with many of his younger friends by then, partly because they had
their own opinions about what he should have done, and partly because he had
business connections with some of the wealthiest hobbits in the Shire, and
wanted to build on those. He no longer took long walks around the Shire, as
he’d done before, and he gave up visiting elves and dwarves when he stopped
speaking to Gandalf.
But of course the rumors and news from the southern lands
slowly but surely turned to the worse, as the Dark Lord gathered his power and
tightened his grip on the western lands a little at a time. I recall when Rohan
fell to Saruman’s goblin armies. That
was a shock for a great many folk, here in the Shire and elsewhere. Soon thereafter, though, Frodo was claiming
that after all, Saruman wasn’t Sauron, and Rohan wasn’t that important, and for
all anyone knew, the wizard and the Dark Lord might well end up at each other’s
throats and spare the rest of us.
Still, it was around that time that Frodo stopped joking
about Gandalf’s warnings, and got angry if anyone mentioned them in his
hearing. It was around that same time, too, that he started insisting loudly
and often that someone would surely stop Sauron. One day it was the elves: after all, they had three rings of power, and
could surely overwhelm the forces of Mordor if they chose to. Another day, the
dwarves would do it, or Saruman, or the men of Gondor, or the Valar in the
uttermost West. There were so many alternatives! His friends very quickly learned to nod and
agree with him, for he would lose his temper and start shouting at them if they
disagreed or even asked questions.
When Lorien was destroyed, that was another shock. It was
after that, as I recall, that Frodo started hinting darkly that the elves
didn’t seem to be doing anything with their three rings of power to stop
Sauron, and maybe they weren’t as opposed to him as they claimed. He came up
with any number of theories about this or that elvish conspiracy. The first
troubles were starting to affect the Shire by then, of course, and his
investments were beginning to lose money; it was probably inevitable that he
would start claiming that the conspiracy was aimed in part against hobbits,
against the Shire, or against him in particular—especially the latter. They
wanted his ring, of course. That played a larger and larger role in his talk as
the years passed.
I don’t recall hearing of any particular change in his
thinking when word came that Minas Tirith had been taken by the Dark Lord’s
armies, but it wasn’t much later that a great many elves came hurrying along
the East Road through the Shire, and a few months after that, word came that
Rivendell had fallen. That was not merely a shock, but a blow; Frodo had grown
up hearing his uncle’s stories about Rivendell and the elves and half-elves who
lived there. There was a time after that news came that some of us briefly
wondered if old Frodo might actually find it in himself to do the thing he’d
refused to do all those years before.
But of course he did nothing of the kind, not even when the
troubles here in the Shire began to bite more and more deeply, when goblins
started raiding the borders of the North Farthing and the Buckland had to be
abandoned to the Old Forest. No, he started insisting to anyone who would
listen that Middle-earth was doomed, that there was no hope left in elves or
dying Númenor, that Sauron’s
final victory would surely come before—oh, I forget what the date was; it was
some year or other not too far from now. He spent hours reading through books
of lore, making long lists of reasons why the Dark Lord’s triumph was surely at
hand. Why did he do that? Why, for the same reason that drove him to each of
his other excuses in turn: to prove to himself that his decision to refuse the
quest hadn’t been the terrible mistake he knew perfectly well it had been.
And then, of course, the Ring betrayed him, as it betrayed
Gollum and Isildur before him. He came home late at night, after drinking
himself half under the table at the Ivy Bush, and discovered that the Ring was
nowhere to be found. After searching Bag End in a frantic state, he ran out the
door and down the road toward Bywater shouting “My precious! My precious!” He
was weeping and running blindly in the night, and when he got to the bridge he
stumbled; over he went into the water, and that was the end of him. They found
his body in a weir downstream the next morning.
The worst of it is that right up to the end, right up to the
hour the Ring left him, he still could have embarked on the quest. It would have been a different journey, and
quite possibly a harder one. With
Rivendell gone, he would have had to go west rather than east, across the Far
Downs to Cirdan at the Grey Havens, where you’ll find most of the high-elves
who still remain in Middle-earth. From there, with such companions as might
have joined him, he would have had to go north and then eastward through Arnor,
past the ruins of Annuminas and Lake Evendim, to the dales of the Misty Mountains,
and then across by one of the northern passes: a hard and risky journey, but by
no means impossible, for with no more need to hinder travel between Rivendell
and Lorien, the Dark Lord’s watch on the mountains has grown slack.
Beyond the mountains, the wood-elves still dwell in the
northern reaches of Mirkwood, along with refugees from Lorien and the last of
the Beornings. He could have gotten
shelter and help there, and boats to travel down the River Running into the
heart of Wilderland. From there his way
would have led by foot to the poorly guarded northern borders of Mordor—when
has Sauron ever had to face a threat from that quarter? So you see that it could have been done. It
could still be done, if someone were willing to do it. Even though so much of
what could have been saved thirty years ago has been lost, even though Minas
Tirith, Edoras, Lorien and Rivendell have fallen and the line of the kings of
Gondor is no more, it would still be worth doing; there would still be many
things that could be saved.
Nor would such a journey have to be made alone. Though
Aragorn son of Arathorn was slain in the last defense of Rivendell, there are
still Rangers to be found in Cirdan’s realm and the old lands of Arnor; there
are elf-warriors who hope to avenge the blood shed at Rivendell, and dwarves
from the Blue Mountains who have their own ancient grudges against the Dark
Lord. The last free Rohirrim retreated to Minhiriath after Éomer fell at Helm’s Deep, and still
war against King Grima, while Gondor west of the river Gilrain clings to a
tenuous independence and would rise up against Sauron at need. Would those and
the elves of Lindon be enough? No one can say; there are no certainties in this
business, except for the one Frodo chose—the certainty that doing nothing will
guarantee Sauron’s victory.
And there might even still be a wizard to join such a quest.
In fact, there would certainly be one—the very last of them, as far as I know.
Gandalf perished when Lorien fell, I am sorry to say, and as for Saruman, the
last anyone saw of him, he was screaming in terror as two Ringwraiths dragged
him through the door of the Dark Tower; his double-dealing was never likely to
bring him to a good end. The chief of the Ringwraiths rules in Isengard now.
Still, there was a third in these western lands: fool and bird-tamer, Saruman
called him, having never quite managed to notice that knowledge of the ways of
nature and the friendship of birds and beasts might have considerable value in
the last need of Middle-earth. Radagast is his name; yes, that would be me.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, you are old Frodo’s youngest cousin,
are you not? Very nearly the only one of his relatives with enough of the wild
Tookish blood in you to matter, or so I am told. It was just a month ago that
you and two of your friends were walking in the woods, and you spoke with quite
a bit of anger about how the older generation of hobbits had decided to huddle
in their holes until the darkness falls—those were your very words, I believe.
How did I know that? Why, a little bird told me—a wren, to be precise, a very
clever and helpful little fellow, who runs errands for me from time to time
when I visit this part of Middle-earth. If you meant what you said then, there
is still hope.
And the Ring? No, it was not lost, or not for long. It slipped from its chain and fell from old Frodo’s pocket as he stumbled home that last night, and a field mouse spotted it. I had briefed all the animals and birds around Hobbiton, of course, and so she knew what to do; she dragged the Ring into thick grass, and when dawn came, caught the attention of a jay, who took it and hid it high up in a tree. I had to trade quite a collection of sparkling things for it! But here it is, in this envelope, waiting for someone to take up the quest that Frodo refused. The choice is yours, my dear hobbit. What will you do?