Repeated Verses

When I teach writing students, I often tell them that nobody will love their work if some people don’t also hate it. They always look stunned, even terrified, as if I’ve just told them they’ll never meet their soul mate unless they also make a mortal enemy of someone.

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing--not just from the wild, but from people's everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mabel [the author's trained goshawk] and the reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation. I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn't love or understand hawks as much as I do if I'd only ever seen them on screens. I've made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk's, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings human give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

I've read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I'm always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can't experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that's a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery.

"After their introductions, Eggers led Gerecke to the cells on the ground floor of the prison. They stopped first at the cell of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy who had flown a secret solo mission to Scotland during the war to try to broker a peace agreement between Germany and the United Kingdom. Most of the attorneys and judges at Nuremberg were sure that Hess was mentally unstable, but the tribunal had decided to go through with his trial. Gerecke was frighted as they approached Hess's cell door. "How could I say the right thing, and say it in German?" he thought. When they entered, Hess, who was six three, stood up from his bunk, towering over Gerecke. "This is Chaplain Gerecke, who will be on duty here from now on," Eggers told Hess. "He will conduct services and be available for counsel if you wish to have him." Gerecke offered the Nazi his hand, and Hess took it. The act of an army chaplain physically touching a Nazi so repelled Americans that Gerecke was later severely criticized for even shaking hands with the defendants. It wasn't an easy gesture for the chaplain to make, and it didn't mean that he was unconcerned with their crimes. Yet he wrote later that he had offered his hand "in order that the Gospel be not hindered by any wrong approach I may make....I knew I could never win any of them to my way of thinking unless they liked me first." "Furthermore," he continued, "I was there as the representative of an all-loving Father. I recalled too, that God loves sinners like me. These men must be told about the Saviour bleeding, suffering and dying on the Cross for them."

E. V. Gordon shared Tolkien's sense of humour. Together the two men helped to form a Viking Club among the undergraduates, which met to drink large quantities of beer, read sagas, and sing comic songs. These were mostly written by Tolkien and Gordon, who made up rude verses about the students, translated nursery rhymes into Anglo-Saxon, and sang drinking songs in Old Norse.

The Welcome