These lines from The Silmarillion really hit me the other day. It relates pretty well to death and impermanence in general.
"But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends: as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song."
OT, but his style is so dense in that book. Why did he write it like that? I've never been able to finish it. I find it almost impenetrable. The Hobbit I read with joy and ease even as a young child. In LOTR, sometimes after reading a paragraph I needed to pause to digest and to connect the dots. In The Silmarillion I need that pause after each clause.
This sucks, because I _need_ to know what's in the book.
I think two key points as to your question of _why_ he wrote it like that. First, it is not a novel that he planned out and then sat down and wrote. It's an amalgamation of disparate stories that Christopher cobbled together into a single book because that was the only way they could sell it to the publishers. It's also the quasi-religious tome of the Tolkien world, so rather than comparing the readability to a Stephen King novel, compare it to something like the Bible or the Torah.
All that said, it took me several reads before I felt like I really 'got' it. The hardest part for me was grasping the long timelines since most of it is a story of the elves and they are immortal. You might be following the same character arc for thousands of years. All that struggle was worth it though, because when you reread LOTR _after_ reading The Silmarillion, you pick out things in LOTR that you didn't even know were there before.
Afaik The Silmarillion was more of a backstory, not really fit for publishing at Tolkiens death. Christopher was the one I believe who collected all the materials into its current form. Don’t forget Tolkien himself was a master linguist!
Checkout this talk by Brandon Rhodes - it explains the context in which the Hobbit and LoTR were written in. I won’t spoil it, but I think it’ll answer your question.
Amidst all the recent fervor surrounding law enforcement and privacy, I think the documents at the linked site are a good reminder that there are people in law enforcement working to protect the innocent.
Hopefully it has two ... a big one at the top and a small one at the bottom.
The funnel metaphor has always thrown me off. IRL I don't pour stuff into a funnel and expect less than 100% of what I've poured in to come out the other side.
I wrote that headline, and I'm acutely aware that a funnel has TWO holes in it. :)
Why do we use the word "funnel" then? Why write "Your funnel has a hole in it" even if you're thinking "Well, duh, it actually already has two holes"?
Here's why:
1. Funnel is the term of art. Like it or not, that's the word people use.
2. It's evocative and it's signaling -- "This is for me, I talk about my sales funnel"
3. Normal people don't think "sales funnel has two holes." Even though they use the word funnel, they really just envision a triangle. Just like when you say the word "chairman" or "cupboard," you don't think "That person is special because he owns the chair and doesn't sit on the floor like the rest of us" or "That's a piece of wood where you place your cups." The "hole in it" evokes more an image of a boat or a bucket, things dribbling through where they shouldn't.
Et voila. Your funnel has a hole in it. As a headline, it works beautifully.
"But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends: as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song."