Several weeks ago one of my friends, who recently taught a short period of high school literature, said she was going do the essay she’d assigned her students and asked if I’d do it too. This is what came of that. And below is a political cartoon I sketched today.

---

6/28/18

Three Things Concerning Hobbits

The story of the hobbits in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is beautiful for three reasons. It illustrates telos gone right. The hobbits are given a purpose in middle earth, and they carry out that purpose well. The story illustrates the paradox concerning how limitations broaden potential and create opportunity. Because the hobbits are such small creatures, their task is an especially great one in the context of their weakness. And thirdly, the story is beautiful because of the faithfulness of Frodo and his fellow hobbits. The task of carrying a magic ring across the expanse of the earth and into a mountain of fire is unlike anything any hobbit has ever been asked to do – yet Frodo does not shrink back.

Socrates was once challenged to a beauty contest by a fellow philosopher named Critobulous. Socrates, a man famous for his ugliness and bad hygiene, accepted the outrageous challenge and made his case in front of the audience.

Socrates: “Do you hold, then, that beauty is to be found only in man, or is it also in other objects?”

Critobulous: “In faith, my opinion is that beauty is to be found quite as well in a horse or an ox or in any number of inanimate things. I know, at any rate, that a shield may be beautiful, or a sword, or a spear.”

Socrates: “How can it be that all these things are beautiful when they are entirely dissimilar?”

“Why, they are beautiful and fine,” answered Critobulus, “if they are well made for the respective functions for which we obtain them, or if they are naturally well constituted to serve our needs.”

Socrates: “Do you know the reason why we need eyes?”

Critobulous. “Obviously to see with.”

Socrates: “In that case, it would appear without further ado that my eyes are finer ones than yours.”

Critobulous: “How so?”

Soctates: “Because, while yours see only straight ahead, mine, by bulging out as they do, see also to the sides.” (West)

Socrates ended up losing the contest, but he pointed out that the beauty of a thing lies in its ability to serve its intended purpose, its telos. On some level, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is an epic rehashing of Socrates’s argument. Instead of bulging eyes, we are shown shrunken hobbits. The intended purpose of Frodo and his friends was to make a long journey across mountains and into hells they’d never dreamed of, and still they consented to see it through. These hobbits recognized their purpose and forged ahead even while the end was uncertain and doom seemed imminent.

To the modern standard of beauty, hobbits are supremely obtuse. They are of small stature, live in mounds of earth, and walk about on large, hairy feet. However Tolkien chose hobbits to carry the ring of power not in spite of their limitations but because of them.

Sometimes limitations expand potential. Any sport, basketball a prime example, is entertaining simply because of the limitations placed on the players. You cannot move the ball without bouncing it. You must shoot within the given time frame. You cannot go outside a certain area and so on. Without these limitations to give context to the actions being performed, basketball would be meaningless. Tolkien wrote hobbits with great limitations in order to expand the meaning and implications of the story. The limitations of hobbits created a need for community, or as the story goes, the fellowship. The hobbits were not very strong – so they leaned on Aragorn. They were not very wise – so they followed Legolas. They lacked courage – so they looked to Gimly. The limitations of the hobbits make the story beautiful.

The beauty of The Lord of the Rings lies also in the faithfulness of the hobbits to the tasks handed them. For a long long time, these tasks were little more than growing food and throwing birthday bashes. But when once they were whisked away on mission that would draw all the realms of middle earth to a final battle, they did what only they could do. They bore what only a hobbit in his innocence could carry. And they walked into the mountain of fire where only their small hairy feet could go. Like Socrates’s deep set, ugly eyes, the hobbits served their true purpose to the good fortune of a million years. When the whole of middle earth was hanging in the balance, it looked itself over for something noble and true. And there, waiting in the wings, was a hobbit.

Works Cited

West, Stephen. “Episode 3 Transcript.” Philosophize This!, Philosophize This!, 24 Nov. 2016, philosophizethis.org/socrates-sophists-episode-3-transcript/. Accessed 25 June 2018

---

Cheers.

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front.”  – G.K. Chesterton

 “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” – I Corinthians 13:12

“Then Elisha prayed, “O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!” The LORD opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.”– II Kings 6:17

I wondered why we cannot see things the same way –

then I wondered why we cannot see the same things at all.

---

We agree on next to nothing. Politics, music, church doctrines, what it means to be a good citizen, whether or not the pitcher should have to bat. The only thing left to do is agree to disagree as they say. The ancients did it for fun; Plato’s Republic is just a bunch of guys sitting around arguing about ideas for hours and hours. I admire good debaters, but I wonder how much the differing of our worldviews has to do with interpretation, and how much sheerly with witnessing different things.

No one chooses the perspective from which they stand to view the world, not completely. In the movie, “The Soloist”, that poor musician didn’t choose to hear voices screaming in his head. Will Byers, the young boy in “Stanger Things”, couldn’t understand why he must be the one constantly getting dragged into another dimension where monsters chase him into the woods. Why do some people have panic attacks or lay in bed all day chained up by depression? For some reason higher than mortal men, these things come upon us. And while they may be considered abnormal, we can hardly say they are false, fictional, smoke and mirrors. To some maybe. But to others the voices and the darkness are more real than anything else. The group’s fortunate inability to see or hear something, does not discount its existence.

Then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun, despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it. – Ecclesiastes 8:17

We see and know so little, but I think sometimes we get glimpses. For fleeting moments we feel a little of the powers and realms that must exist out there somewhere. Good things. Bad things. Nice things. Sad things. A funeral or a wedding. A friend walking away. Falling in love. Summitting a mountain. A movie or a concert. There’s a weighted motion coming down on you, and you know, you know, that it’s far beyond the dust you’re made from. There are a thousand people sitting in this room, am I the only one seeing this? And when it passes, it hasn’t become untrue. You simply turned your head around the tree to see that it wasn’t a tree at all – only the back hiding something. Maybe heaven is the gathering of all the eyes and ears – the stories from all of us about what was really out there.

I think this phenomenon, that different people see the same world and a different world altogether, accounts for more than we realize. I scream and shout during debate to validate what I’ve seen – trying to convince my neighbor that I’m right. I know what I’ve seen. But he objects, he was there too; we all were. And he seen a demon where the angel is said to have stood.

But it’s more than just hearing voices and being plagued by depression. Why do some people feel so strongly, insist so intently, about certain ideas? Why do people hate rock and roll or only drive black cars or drive no cars at all? We’re living on the same planet, but somehow we’re seeing things from different angels – and different things altogether. The difficult thing to discern is when to trust my neighbor and his account and when to oppose him. I love the practice of philosophy. It fascinates me that people used to sit around for hours and hours just to debate each other, to convince each other of ideas. But to look someone in the eye and say, “Alright, I trust you. I don’t see what you see, but I love you anyway.” It’s not an easy thing.

I don’t know why some people see the demons. Why do only some witness the horror and panic? Why are some eyes blinded and some eyes opened? And for how much longer must we stand on the back side of everything?

Come Lord Jesus, spin this world on its heels, that we might look it in the eyes and smile back.

“Chase This Light” – Jimmy Eat World

Because tonight the world turned in me,

Because right now I don’t dare breathe,

Oh babe I know, it’s alive,

And somewhere for us to find tonight,

Chase this light with me,

CRAZYTALK – Mat Kearney

When Mat Kearney gave us his fifth album, JUST KIDS, in February of 2015, it surprised me. I distinctly remember listening through the whole album on a long ride home from Pennsylvania in March. The sounds on that album were starkly different than what I was used to hearing from him – but it was good. From the first song on the record, Heartbreak Dreamer, all the way through the hometown anthem, Oregon, it’s stylishly Mat Kearny, well-written and groovy. JUST KIDS did feel somewhat experimental; there were sounds, even words, I’d never heard before. Yet it didn’t feel like a stylistic left turn but a new flavor of tried and true.

Earlier this month Mat Kearney released CRAZYTALK. After listening through, the only world that comes to mind is ‘uninspired’. It’s been three years since Mat Kearney put out an album, and CRAZYTALK was not worth the wait.

Face to Face, Kings and Queens, and Wanted Man are the only songs I might be tempted to revisit when scrolling through Spotify. It’s unfair to expect an artist to reproduce another version of past material – but you always hope they continue to flesh out new ideas and melodies in a creative way. That’s what Mat Kearney has been doing for a long time, but I felt like that only happened a few times in this newest record.

Mat Kearney’s writing has always been pretty simple, his lines make it seem like writing a song is something anyone could do – which is pretty cool. That approach doesn’t change in CRAZYTALK. His subject matter has also been fairly uniform over the years. Usually songs are written for or about his wife or personal reflection with the occasional Rochester. This doesn’t change, but these lines are less eloquent than they’ve ever been. When looking for lyrics online, I had to make sure to add his name to the track title because almost every song shared a title with another artist’s work. Once again, it’s not fair to expect reproduction, but as my brother Luke said of By Your Side, “It’s no Shasta”.

CRAZYTALK feels like a bout of writer’s block forged into a sixth album. It’s the kind of album that you hope the artist leaves off the set-list if you’re going to a live show. I’m not sure what the train of thought behind the album art was, but the neon pink is, uh, not attractive. In I Can’t Wait for You to Get Here, he writes,

“We were picking rings and riding trains,

Now we’re picking paint and middle names,”

It seems, unfortunately, that the former made for better songs. I have some problems with the writing on this album.  I found the incorporation of pop-culture language into songs very obnoxious. The words Netflix, Kanye, Beyonce, latte, ‘vacay’, chill days, and Coldplay all show up in my least favorite song on the album, Money; it’s cringworthy. There are far more endearing terms to describe your girl than U.S. currency. Maybe his well of love songs has run dry.

I’m still puzzled by the tonal choices used in many of the tracks. The choice of guitar to drive Kings and Queens and Wanted Man doesn’t seem right to me. Then I don’t even know what’s happening in Fortress, but it ain’t working. I love Mat Kearney’s piano ballads like New York to California and In the Middle, but no such appearances were made here.

All told, I was greatly disappointed by CRAZYTALK; I think it’s his least impressive record thus far. The reviews by CCM and Jesusfreakhideout somehow give it four stars – I’d give it two. If you listen through and some of the better songs sort of strike your fancy, you might say, “Ah, it isn’t so bad.” But as Sir Percy Blakeney said in The Scarlet Pimpernel, “Nothing in the world is so bad as something that is not so bad.” So throw down the needle on Young Love again, and here’s to album number seven.