For still there are so many things/That I have never seen/In every wood in every spring/There is a different green. – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
We are not entirely certain, but J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) might be this features most frequent contributor, right up there with Gore Vidal. Both are writers who not only tell a great story and produce the insights into our human experience you pay us writers to provide but do so in rich, elegant prose that might be unsurpassed in modern English letters.
A fantasy writer with an imagination you would expect, Tolkien’s imagination extended to his personal life as well. While serving as an officer in the British Army in World War I – an event he deferred as long as possible, contrary to the custom of the time – he developed a code with his wife Edith to foil British censors so she could track his unit’s progress across the European front from his letters.
For still there are so many things/That I have never seen…
One of the lessons life offers is it’s a big world with an awful lot of people living rather random lives. We’ve produced an awful lot of things to see – from the squalid to the splendid – and there are an awful lot of things to do, from things that provide a dividend to things that merely mark time.
We owe it to ourselves to see as much of this as we can, with the realization, also one of life’s lessons, that we can’t experience all of them. Our resources of time and money are, for most, too limited for that. And even if they were unlimited, we can’t spend all our time investigating the unknown. All of us have talents, skills and ambitions that must be cultivated and this should take up the majority of our time. .
…in every wood in every spring/there is a different green.
But we should make an effort to see what we can. We can’t live our lives in a shell. It could be as simple as taking an afternoon to indulge in a favorite pastime or as involved as a trip far away because we never know what we will find. It doesn’t matter what it is, either, as long it answers something that stems from inside us.
There are so many greens out there we must find follow our paths to see everything nature and circumstance has in store for us.
The Thought for the Day runs regularly. Gaylon began stockpiling quotes in 1988.
