Aristotle and the Gun

 

One of the coolest things about reading science fiction, aside from the potentiality of falling in to a great tale, is that on occasion a “great idea” – crazy, weird, mind-altering, world-expanding, awe-inspiring – a great idea will pop up and sweep me off my feet. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. A couple times a year, I guess, for someone like me who reads science fiction about twenty, twenty-five percent of the time.

This just happened a few days ago.

You may know I am working my way through 18th century historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a 1,270-page bucket list item that’ll take me about four months to march through. Now, since I’m a hopper and I’m determined to finish this tome before Little One returns from Italy, I’m only going to allow myself two science fiction short stories for every hundred pages of Gibbon I milepost.

So I just read two stories from 1991’s Modern Classics of Science Fiction I picked up just for this occasion. It was in the second one, “Aristotle and the Gun,” by L. Sprague de Camp, that a small idea wormed itself into my mind and refuses to leave.

First, a word about Mr. de Camp. Or L. Sprague. I’m not sure how to refer to him. He was a writer from the pre-Golden Age of Science Fiction, primarily the 30s and 40s. This is only the third short story of his I’ve read (each one from a different sci fi omnibus read in a different decade), but I did read his novel Lest Darkness Falls way way back in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it (I graded it an A-). The essence of the tale is – what would you do, with your knowledge and know-how, if you were transported back to Rome c. AD 550, as the city falls to the barbarians and the world teeters on darkness. A meek, run-of-the-mill archaeologist finds himself mysteriously in such a situation, and what follows is, well, what he does, and what he does, simple at first, turns out quite remarkable.

“Aristotle and the Gun” (1956) is of a similar idea. In the far distant future a scientist teleports himself back in time in attempt to meet Aristotle and subtly influence the philosopher so that the scientific age can happen half a millennia sooner that it did in his timeline.

The main character mentions that classic nagging problem that pops up in every time travel story: How much effect will one teeny tiny change in the past alter the future? A.k.a., the butterfly effect. The nifty part is that he states that the extent of the butterfly effect is directly correlated to whether space-time has a negative or positive curvature. “If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.”

Now I never thought about the universe’s curvature relating to time. I always thought of it, way back in my physics days and since, in terms of space. After all, space is a physical thing, at least that can be curved. How can time curve? A positively curved universe can be imagined as a great sphere whereas a negatively curved universe is like a horse saddle. But since space and time are connected into one four-dimensional entity care of Einstein, spacetime, one must think of time as positively or negatively curved.

When reading the story I immediately thought of the difference between a closed and open universe, as in a universe which will eventually collapse upon itself as opposed to one which will continue to expand forever. Which fate is realized depends on the amount of mass in the universe, as mass works as a brake on expansion. Curvature itself, though, does not necessarily influence whether the universe is bounded or unbounded, closed or open. But wouldn’t it be cool if somehow mass also affected the flow of time? I mean, it must, right, since it’s right there in the term spacetime.

(And I think it must be in Einstein’s relativity equations, if I remember correctly. It’s been a while ... a long while ...)

I dunno; I think I just gave myself a headache. Someone give me a million dollars so I can quit my job and think about these things, okay?

Turandot

 

Ah, memories!

Twenty years … how fast that goes by. Twenty years ago the Mrs. and I were newlyweds. We rented in an affluent town a spacious apartment for half the mortgage I pay now. We had good friends, good jobs (despite a little bit of rockiness in my world commuting in and out of NYC), but most of all, we had MONEY! Why? Well, a Republican was in the White House, so the economy was doing well, which really helps with the quantity of my wife’s bonuses, but the real reason is, aside from not being hitched to a money pit – er, house – we were still childless.

I had two really good friends at this point (one sadly has since passed away), and I did a lot of things with them, and with all our spouses. I wasn’t the avid reader I am today believe it or not. My buddies and I would work out together, hike, go sailing off the Jersey shore, go to sports bars, pool parties, the whole works. We’d take the wives out to dinner with no thought of how much $ was in the bank account. It was a fun and happy time I suppose every couple goes through before they start chasing that ever-elusive, ever-expensive and ever-burdensome American Dream.

The one thing I did as a solo hobby before reading was investigate music. During my decade-long stint as an ultimately unsuccessful musician I had acquired a 200-CD collection up until 1998 or so, when I realized I was completely bored with the state of current rock music. Nothing satisfied me. The last two bands I was into back then, the Screaming Trees and the Presidents of the United States of America, I pretty much enjoyed, but could find nothing – literally nothing – to follow them up with.

After a few months I realized that it might be a neat idea to explore classical music. Take a clean break from hard rock / heavy metal / grunge / etc. and just listen to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et. al. In 1992 I had bought a six-pack of CDs from those three composers, listened to the music a few times, then stored them away. A few Christmases later Santa gifted me a ten-pack CD of classical compositions. I did the same with them. Then, in April of 1998, I pulled them all out and began listening with attention.

I discovered my local library had a couple hundred classical CDs available to borrow. This really fueled my obsession. That first year I borrowed 29 CDs sampling a wide range of composers and styles. I bought 24 CDs of the ones I enjoyed the most. A dozen years later I had a collection of a 105 classical music CDs, two-thirds of which were purchased within those first five years.

Why all this?

Well, because it’s kinda happening again. This time with records. I’m now up to 33 records, thanks to a discovery I made yesterday.

Indulge me a little more background. Twenty years ago I spent some time investigating opera. It didn’t really stick, but I do have my prejudices. I am not a Verdi aficionado, though both operas I’ve seen at Lincoln Center were Verdis. I much prefer Wagner. The gold standard for my record collecting (which is very much like antiquing, as you’ll see in a moment), is to score all four operas in Wagner’s “ring cycle.” Aside from that, though, I enjoy Puccini, but the Puccini I enjoy most is Turandot.

My youngest bought me a Brahms and a Tchaikovsky album for Christmas, so it’s been over a month since I’ve had a new record to listen to. Yesterday she and the Mrs. decided to head out to a trendy, artsy little town down here in Texas about 45 minutes away. This town also had that neat record store which sold classical music albums for a quarter. I jumped at the opportunity.

But to my frustration and annoyance that record store let their stock of classics dwindle without resupply. All that was left from four long rows of plastic wrapped used albums was about a dozen musty, yellowed (and probably warped) bottom of the barrel compositions. Ugh. What a letdown.

So I tagged along with the ladies as they browsed and window-shopped. Patch wanted to find some antique backing for a shelf in her room where she’s collecting vintage dolls. We hit a place my oldest, Little One, recommended, and what do you know? Hidden between all the faded woodworked furniture and rusty gadgets and old plates and glasses and Life magazines from the 50s was – a nook filled with old records! True, most were Country, Western, and Country-Western, but there was some rock – a half-dozen Johnny Winter records – and … classical! The music gods nodded and a Turandot leaped off the shelf into my arms.

The price was a little steep for me for philosophical reasons – $16.34 with tax – but the complete opera was a three-record set. It’s a version of Turandot I’m not familiar with, being conducted by Erich Leinsdorf with Birgit Nilsson in the lead role (I’m used to the Pavarotti version). And the cover art is … well … we can avoid talking about the cover art. The record was pressed in 1960.

 

 

 So I am very well pleased. This should keep me satisfied for another month or so. I have threatened the family with a Listening Party tonight and tomorrow night, 8 to 9 pm sharp. They have humored me with enthusiasm about attending, but I’m a thousand percent sure this will be a solo experience. Which is fine, because the music is phenomenal, and I am looking forward to a sublime listen.

Barbed Wire on the Border

 

Couple of observations from Hopper down here in the Lone Star state …

 

(1) Though I’ve been living down here in Texas for two-and-a-half years, my house is about a half hour north of Dallas. That means I’m roughly 420 or so miles away from the closest point of the southern border. That’s almost three times more distant than my parents, who live in the mountains of Pennsylvania, are from the Jersey shore. Or as far as New York City is to Niagara Falls. Or about 45 minutes longer than it takes one to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, if you’re on the left coast. So the border crisis does not really affect me in a way that keeps me up at night.

 

(2) Texas is basically 98 percent red (conservative), with the major exception being the People’s Republic of Austin. While our neighborhood HOA disallows political signage of any type, you occasionally run into the loony Beto fan with election posters plastered all about or a house with one of those cringy hate-has-no-home-here placards creeping unobtrusively in a shrub off to one side of the front door. Again, by the same ratio, about two houses in every hundred.

 

(3) Conservatives down here are very proud of Governor Abbott. Maybe a presidential candidate in ’28 or ’32? I dunno; he’s getting up there in age. He is in a wheelchair (but doesn’t flaunt it; I was here a year before I discovered this). He’s doing (mostly) all the right things down here. At least in sparring with the Biden Administration and handling the border. I hear some people bicker about him being soft on crime or guns and not as strong as he could be about state economics, and I can complain too, but by and large I’m a fan.

 

(4) We absolutely love it that he has been sending illegal immigrants up north. I say keep sending them if they keep coming. We’re enjoying Mayor Adams of NYC squirming in trying to deal with the immigrant problem – and the crime and economic shocks it brings with it – as well as the Chicago Mayor. We also loved packing them off to Martha’s Vineyard. I – and many others down here – say start resending them there. And also target other liberal enclaves, such as Hollywood, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Aspen. Oh – and don’t forget Washington DC!

 

(5) These are not just publicity stunts. If a national government comprised of states dictates a policy that would affect only a handful of such states detrimentally, and those handful of states are essentially outnumbered in dictating policy, I believe it is reasonable that such states may address the issue so all states – or at least those states dictating the policy – can experience the detriment too. Like many hotbed political issues nowadays, it’s best said simply in a meme:

 

 

 

(6) In an effort to deter illegal immigration, Texas has strung up barbed wire along certain parts of the border. This was struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court. Interestingly, all four female justices voted against the Texas position. Now, I am not really a legal guy; Law doesn’t hold my interest. But for the life of me I can’t fathom why the government would take the side of disallowing a state to respond to what basically amounts to an invasion. Just doesn’t make sense without that proverbial tinfoil hat.

 

(7) It is an invasion. My mouth dropped to the floor recently when a relative likened the illegal influx of Mexicans and Central Americans to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. And I still hear the old “as a Christian, how can you be for a wall? (or barbed wire at the border)?” Well, one can be a Christian and be against an invasion of 5,000 migrants a day, many of whom are military-age young men, and most of which is done without documentation or screening. This is not the same as callously stepping over a local homeless person walking up the stairs to the church. Apples and oranges.

 

(8) There will not be a second civil war over all this. Abbott and Texas stood up to whoever is running the Biden Administration with a concise letter which essentially emphasizes a state’s right to defend itself, a right that overrules federal mandate. Over a dozen southern and western states joined in solidarity with Texas. The federal government will back down, is backing down, for several reasons. The media is not reporting it front-page. It’s a lose-lose proposition for the Democrats going into an election year, and the Border Patrol is starting to let slip that it would not interfere with state agencies further.

 

Anyway, just some thoughts from an amateur in the area but not at the area. I welcome any correction or explanation or respectful disagreement. Otherwise, back to regularly scheduled programming in a day or so. Just wanted to vent, I guess.

   

Churchill and Gibbon

 

Ever since I started reading about World War II, probably going back to 2011 but gaining some steam during the initial days of Covid, I started finding Churchill everywhere. It was a weird instance of synchronicity. I’d read an article in Astronomy magazine about the space race and Churchill’s name would turn up. I’d thumb through a book on the Crusades and there would be old Winston. Watched a YouTube video on the 1947 UFO flap and they’d mention the British Prime Minister’s curiosity in the phenomenon. Pick three random self-help books off the B&N shelves and scan the index, and chances are you’ll find Churchill’s name there, and a nifty quote somewhere in the meat of the book in question.

 

So I found it very pleasing to discover the fact that young Winston was a huge fan of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

 

[As you may know, my oldest daughter Little One is now in Italy for her college spring semester sophomore year, studying philosophy, theology, literature and art in Rome. I am reading through Gibbon’s late-18th century history of the Roman Empire in sympathetic solidarity with her – though I don’t believe that’s one of the works assigned to her. And as of this posting, I am 52 pages in … about 4 percent done …]

 

To quote a mature Churchill:

 

“I set out upon Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly though it from end to end and enjoyed it all.” Wikipedia states – I know, I know – that the British statesman “modeled much of his own literary style on Gibbon’s … like Gibbon, he dedicated himself to producing a ‘vivid historical narrative, ranging widely over period and place, enriched by analysis and reflection.’ ”

 

How awesome this is to a bookworm history buff like me!

 

I spent a month about a dozen years ago commuting to work listening to an audio book of the first volume of his World War II memoirs, The Gathering Storm. If I continue to enjoy Gibbon as much as I am so far – that is, the remaining 96 percent – perhaps I’ll revisit Winston later this fall.

 

Buon Viaggio!

 

 

Well, Little One has left the continental USA and is en route to Italy for her next semester of college. Four months of study in Rome, Monday through Thursday, and weekends exploring the country and countryside. I kinda envy her, but am complacent enough to enjoy her travels vicariously.

 

She’ll take classes in Art & Architecture, Literary Traditions, The Human Person, Western Civilization I, and Western Theological Tradition. What these course titles translate exactly to we’ll learn shortly. One thing, though, that makes me happy is not one of these classes will disparage Western Civilization or literary traditions, glorify ugly modern art, corrupt the concept of the human person, or mock traditional theology. We chose wisely with this college.

 

Best of luck to you, Little One! Stay safe and have the time of your life!

 

Strange New Words

 

Absquatulated (pg. 81, The Alamo, by John Myers Myers)

Defalcations (pg. 116, The Alamo, by John Myers Myers)

and

Sciniphs (Exodus 8:16, New Catholic Bible)

 

One of the pleasures of being a ferocious and voracious reader is encountering new words. Strange new words. The stranger, the better. I feel like one of those old-timey scientists out in the jungle coming across a new specimen of insect. Or, more appropriately, a jeweler who discovers a new gemstone in a new setting never before beheld.

 

Paradoxically, it’s not a common experience. Perhaps it’s the type of books I read. Well, obviously it is. And though I haven’t specifically been tracking it, I’m sure over the past year where I purposefully put away more bucket-list classic literature I’ve noticed sparkling new examples of these gemstones, these strange new words.

 

So I was quite pleasantly surprised over the weekend when I encountered not one, not two, but three of these neat little gifts: absquatulated, defalcations, and sciniphs.

 

Now, sciniphs I can understand. It’s from the Douay-Rheims bible, translated into English sometimes in the late 1500s if I’m not mistaken, so there’s four centuries of word evolution in play here. A more modern translation Bible I have handy replaces it with the word “gnat”, and it is one of the Ten Plagues on Egypt in the Book of Exodus. But isn’t it more evocative, more mysterious, more satisfying, to use the older, now out-of-date “sciniphs” for “gnats”? Don’t answer; that’s a rhetorical question.

 

But the other two, especially the first, truly blew my mind: “absquatulated” and “defalcations.” In a book on, of all subjects, the Alamo. True, it was published in 1948, and I wholeheartedly believe in the dumbing-down of the culture thesis. But these two words left me with no choice but to scratch my head.

 

Care to venture a guess based on context? Here are the sentences in which they each appeared:

 

“Even before the council had absquatulated with the government and scrambled the chain of command, the state’s military situation had continued to deteriorate.”

“Such expert transfers of balances to undiscovered bournes! Such august defalcations!”

(Bonus points for including the word “bourne” there.)

 

Well, contextually I read “absconded” for the first and “misdeeds” for the second. And that’s generally correct when I looked them up afterward, after having my not-so-little little ones make their own attempts at definitions (and they were generally correct, too).

 

Still, a nice trio of finds.

 

Now I challenge you to go out into the world and use one of them in a sentence today!

Fibonacci Kilometers

 

I just learned a nifty little item a few days ago that only stuck out to me since I posted a bad math joke on Fibonacci numbers about a month ago.

 

First, a refresher for those mathematically challenged. Don’t worry; it’s pretty easy.

 

The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers obtained by adding the two prior to numbers together to get the next number in sequence. It starts with a 0 and 1, then you get the following:

 

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …

 

It’s got about a billion uses in math and computer science and shows up in such various areas as nature, architecture, and the subject of beauty. I never got too deep into it in my college days a few decades back. Might look into it as an anti-Alzheimer’s medicine in a few years, though.

 

Anyway, when you take the ratio of a Fibonacci number with the one prior to it and go out through the sequence to infinity, that ratio closes in on 1.618…, or what’s called the Golden Ratio.

 

What’s special about this ratio is that it’s very close to the ratio between a kilometer and a mile. Since a mile is longer, for every mile you travel, you travel 1.609 kilometers. Very close to that 1.618.

 

So, to know how many kilometers you’ve traveled when you know how many miles you’ve traveled, simply go to the Fibonacci sequence above and move one number to the right.

 

For example, traveling 5 miles is equivalent to traveling 8 kilometers.

 

It goes in the opposite direction to convert kilometers to miles. If you’re in Europe and a city is 55 kilometers away, that translates to 34 miles in distance.

 

How neat is that?!

 

A Literary Vision

 

 Last night Professor Tolkien, Oxford philologist and epic literary genre creator, appeared to me in a dream. “Hopper,” he addressed me through a cloud of pipe smoke, at ease before an old English hillside, “see this man?” 

And an image appeared before me:

 

“Y-yes,” I said, still amazed at the vision of the Professor in front of me and not really focusing on this newer image.

 

“Look!”

 

This time I did look. “Who is it?”

 

“This is Edward Gibbon. He lived from 1737 until 1794.”

 

I did a quick calculation. “56! That’s my age! … my God, do I look like that?”

 

Tolkien blew a ring of smoke and the Gibbon image faded. “Do you know this man?”

 

Gibbon … Gibbon … Yes! “Yes! He wrote about the Roman Empire. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire – ”

 

“The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he casually corrected me with a trace of a grin. “You have this book in your collection.”

 

I thought a moment, then – yes! – in my Great Books of the Western World collection, currently housed in the storage space under the staircase along with all the Christmas decorations recently put away.

 

“I read that book … twenty years ago.”

 

The Professor raised his eyebrows.

 

“Well,” I back-pedaled, “I started to read it. Maybe got a hundred pages in.” I thought further, scanning my memories. “It was in Cape Cod. My wife and I were first dating, on our first weekend away together, and I picked it up in a bookstore there.”

 

“Indeed you did, but you never finished it.”

 

What he said was true. But where was this going?

 

As if he could read my thoughts, he put aside his pipe and stared into my eyes. “Hopper, I appreciate your plan to delve back into my works, in a certain ‘internally chronologic way’ as you put it. Tell me, how many times have you read my works?”

 

“Many times, sir.”

 

“More than once?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“More than twice?”

 

“Yes.” Where was this heading? “I’ve read your works since I was ten or so. The Hobbit. Then The Lord of the Rings, as a twelve or thirteen-year-old. I stumbled a bit through The Silmarillion the next year, but then I took a twenty year hiatus until I re-read them all. This spring will be my fifth go around – ”

 

“And how many times has your daughter gone to Italy?”

 

I froze, jaw agape. I think I knew where this was going.

 

Tolkien started to meander down a muddy lane that just happened to materialize. Bales of hay dotted the fields past a wooden fence. “Your daughter is going to Italy, perhaps the heart of Western Civilization. She is going there to study philosophy, art, and architecture, and, let us not forget, literature. You’ve always did some sort of sympathetic reading with her, no?”

 

“Yes. When she was assigned The Divine Comedy freshman year I read it too. Then, on her recommendation, I started The Aeneid, but, to be honest, I never finished it.”

 

He paused in consideration. “How long will she be gone?”

 

“Four months.”

 

“I think you should take up a work related to Italy that would take you about four months to journey through.”

 

The light went off, and he smiled at me as we said, together, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire!”

 

He chuckled. “Plus, if I know you as well as I think I do, Hopper, it’s also a work on your bucket list?”

 

“Yes! Yes it is!”

 

Then a hearty laugh, and he reached in to his inner jacket pocket for a pinch of tobacco and relit his pipe. “Hopper, I grant you permission to set aside a fifth re-reading of my works to spiritually walk the streets of ancient Rome as your daughter walks the modern ones, and cross another item off your list.”

 

I was enlightened. “Thank you, master!”

 

“There is but one master,” the devout Catholic said to me, “and I am not He.”

 

And as I was about to reply in affirmation, the vision faded and I woke nestled and comfortable in my bed.

The Founding Fathers

 

So my oldest daughter, Little One, bought me a couple books this Christmas, books on “a historical era that I know you haven’t read before.” And what she said was true. She gifted me one of the Very Short Introduction books, The Founding Fathers and a non-VSI but still very short book, The Jacksonian Era. Roughly the first 50 years of the existence of the United States. She was correct. Over the past dozen years I’ve read hundreds of pages on the Civil War, World War II, and the Napoleonic Wars, but this section of history I haven’t plumbed since taking Brother Lawrence’s US History class sophomore year of high school in the early 80s.

 

Well, I just finished the VSI The Founding Fathers, and I am fascinated. Now, not fascinated enough to devote additional time and effort to the subject – unless I was either a) a lawyer, b) a politician, c) a pundit, or d) financially independent. Other more pressing issues are, er, pressing upon me. But it was an extremely interesting diversion over a couple of hours over a couple of days.

 

The book was not too in depth – it couldn’t be, being a Very Short Introduction book, but the subject itself is difficult to summarize. That’s what struck me so hard reading this. The magnitude of all that falls under the umbrella term, the founding fathers. I almost wish I read this book thirty or forty years ago. Indeed, any young person looking to pursue a career in either a, b, or c, above, should spend many months delving this subject. One image I had was the book covering the first three or four inches of Mount Everest.

 

What do I mean?

 

Immediately my mind went to making lists.

 

If one wanted to truly study the Founding Fathers, one would have to pursue many branches. So a second image presented itself to me: a massive tree with a big fat trunk in which someone looking like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer etched “The Founding Fathers” with a pocketknife. And what follows? This –

 

Thick, twisting roots burrowing deep in the ground. Some labeled “The Roman Republic” and “Greek Democracy”, others “Classical Literature” and “Greek” and “Roman” languages. A larger, stronger segment would be called “The Enlightenment,” with offshoots titled “Locke” and “Hume.” The confluence of all these roots grew to push the beliefs and philosophies of the Founding Fathers up through the ground into the sunlight.

 

There would be numerous branches reaching upward, spreading out thickly in smaller and smaller subdivisions. The main branch, erupting immediately from the trunk, would be, of course, “The Constitution.” Then, in no particular order but grouped according to genus, many other limbs would sprout, limbs with names such as:

 

   - The Fathers themselves: Writings, Autobiographies, Biographies

 

   - The History of the Founding of America: The Colonies, the Deteriorating Relation with England, the Continental Congress(es), the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation

 

   - The first presidencies

 

   - Federalism versus Republicanism

 

   - Originalist Interpretation versus the “Living Document”

 

   - The Bill of Rights, further Amendments and the Amendment Process

 

   - The growth and development of the federal government: The Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the Judicial Branch

 

   - The inner workings of government, the life cycle of bills and laws, etc., sausage-factory analogy notwithstanding

 

   - Legal challenges faced by the early American government, especially the three-fifths compromise, Marbury v. Madison and the Dred Scott decision

 

   - The faults or shortfalls, perceived or not, of the Constitution at its creation and over its history

 

One could spend four solid years, I believe, prepping himself in this vast, fruitful vineyard, and indeed many do, I suppose, those of whom aspire to be political science majors. Were I to have read this book in high school, and was more of an ENTP than an INTP, I’d definitely immerse myself in a full three-months of summertime excavation before taking up studies in the American political process, as first envisioned and shaped by the Founding Fathers.

Happy Birthday J.R.R.

 

The Master would have been 132 today. Funny to think that when he was my age Truman was president, the Cold War was in its infancy, the atom bomb was still just an American weapon, and his antithesis, the anti-Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, was a newborn babe. And he’d still be six years away from publishing his magnum opus.

 

(By the way, these R.R.’s in authorial pen names fascinate me to no end.)

 

Anyway, since Tolkien was a dedicated if not devout Catholic, I do not think he would mind too much if I delayed my 2024 Tolkien Reading Plan a couple of weeks while I make my way through the books my loved ones have given me this Christmas – slim volumes on the founding fathers, the Jacksonian era of American History, and the Alamo. Once done the Silmarillion gets opened and Ilúvatar creates Middle-earth, and the quest begins ...

 

Happy birthday, and happy readings!