You know how we often beg Potterheads and overcharged Tolkienians to read another book?
Well, I am begging this guy never to read another book.
Like, ever again.
Well, I am begging this guy never to read another book.
Like, ever again.
I say this as someone who has little patience with Tolkienβs shudderings about modernity, dislikes the fantasy of bucolic peoples living off the land, and the fact that his escape from reality is a place where race-thinking is just common sense leaves a bad taste on my brain.
The longing for a more technology-free world is often based upon a sentimental view of the past or of 'the simple life' and, like sentimentality in other spheres, it is infused with a sick ignorance.
Fond memory of the low-tech past tends to recall dances and peasant merriment while desperately forgetting the agony of physical labor, the pain of arthritis and unalleviated cystitis.
But the profound silliness of J. R. R. Tankien here is what you get when you try to use a surplus of ideology to make up for a severe deficit of imagination.
Never take your literary cues from someone who uses βOrientalβ unironically in the year of our lord 2022, and who talks about Xi and the Belt and Road initiative like this while ludicrously unaware of things like how much soy is used in Chinese cuisine.
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