18
Aug
2010
influenced by Outside Forces
Some background on my influences is called for I believe. Let us start with how The Lord of the Rings effected me.
Like many, I had read The Lord of the Rings as a child. One of my earliest memories of reading is snuggling into a cubby in third grade and reading The Two Towers all by myself. Reading was an escape for me, an escape from my classmates and the uncomfortable reality of the public school system. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have any friends… in fact, it’s difficult to look back on my childhood with an objective eye. My feelings clearly altered my memories of that time, injecting feelings of persecution and otherness that I’m sure now were unwarranted.
Reading took all that away. I wasn’t ME anymore. I was Frodo, or Peter in the Chronicles of Narnia, or a Martian walking the rusty landscape of Bradbury’s mind. Fantasy and SciFi helped me learn what Truth was, at a time when everyone else seemed to lie to me. A lot of things I imagined were true were crumbling around me. I was dealing with being my own person, with becoming a teen and eventually a man, and my relationship to God. But nobody around me seemed willing or able to give me any help in that regard. Instead my life was a shuffle from one standardized test to another, the focus on becoming a functioning member of society overwhelming any drive to become an individual human being. With the real world crushing who I was becoming, is it any wonder I turned to fiction?
But the fiction I sought was hardly an escape. I looked for the dark places, I learned of suffering. I NEEDED to find a way to explain why people feel pain, why love goes unrequited, why a just and loving God would allow evil to exist. Of course my obsessive search for those answers in Worlds-Not-Our-Own labeled me as something Other once I got older… “Don’t worry,” I was told, “You’ll really get to enjoy yourself and become your own person in college.” The insinuation being you aren’t ALLOWED to become your own person before then because nobody is ready to deal with a teen who demands answers.
It would be inaccurate to say I put aside those childish things in high school – more like traded them in for more socially acceptable fixations like video games and popular music. These things were fun, but they weren’t a search for any kind of truth (not that my teen brain could wrap itself around this concept). That I might have abandoned something honest in order to become a mindless processor of what my demographic consumed never occurred to me, although looking back it really explains the bizarre feelings I was losing myself despite my attempts to prove I was unique by listening to the same gritty rock song as everyone else.
So it was with great excitement I embarked on my college career. Surely, HERE things would be different! Now I could join the ranks of adults who MAKE the world, not just inhabit it. Now I could exert some control over my own destiny.
It was not to be. My first semester of freshmen year was in the Fall of 2001. I learned just how little control anyone has over anything in the world, and my beliefs about Good, Evil, God and Humanity weren’t just shaken to their core, they were shattered.
But Tolkien picked up the pieces. You see, I’d forgotten about those books completely by now. It had been so long since I’d read them, and I’d “learned” so much since then that they were fuzzy and gray in my mind, no longer relevant. They described Things That Didn’t Matter, right? And yet, as I rediscovered those books, I remembered why I loved them as a boy. I remembered feeling strange and alone for loving a world that wasn’t my own. And in my freshman year, as I once more walked the paths from Hobbiton to Imladris, to Moria, Cirith Ungol and Mount Doom itself… I discovered I wasn’t alone. They, like me, demanded answers through their fiction, sought to understand the real by immersing themselves in the unreal just as I did. That there were others who see the World That Is through the lens of the World That Might Be.
And that we were Legion.
