imagine how is touch the sky

Meller's Mongoose Rhynchogale melleri

A small brown mongoose native to savannas and woodlands of southeastern Africa, from central Tanzania south through Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, to Eswatini and northeastern South Africa. The Meller's mongoose lives alone and is active at night, feeding on termites or other small insects and animals.

I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.