Smart Ass Take:
Tolkien makes a case here that I keep forgetting and keep needing: enchantment isn’t escapism, it’s a truer realism than the cynicism most of us default to by Wednesday. LIVE means feeling the range of the thing — the ruth and the delight — and refusing the small, tidy conviction that the world is already known and mostly disappointing. Worth reading, worth rereading, worth arguing with your own weary brain about.
Article Excerpt:
Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism.
Article Summary:
Another sagacious post from Maria Popova tells us that, in 1964, Tolkien agreed to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, then spent two uneasy years deciding that introductions ruin stories. Classic Tolkien move: accept the assignment, wrestle it to the ground, hand it back.
But the wrestling forced him to think hard about what he called Faery — the enchanted world — and the thinking became Smith of Wootton Major (1967), along with a postscript that quietly does more philosophical work than most books three times its size.
His argument: Enchantment is a fusion of ruth (an old word for pity and grief) and delight. It breaks from the “iron ring” of assuming the familiar world is already known, possessed, and therefore all that matters. It’s a love for things as other — animate and inanimate — that produces both ache and wonder.
And crucially, enchantment isn’t escapism. Tolkien insists it’s more honest than cynicism or pessimism or even optimism, because it returns us to the ordinary world newly aware that the ordinary world is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability. Faery, he says, is as necessary to a functioning human as sunlight is to a functioning body.