I got bored! Here's the original that I wrote and here's the summary on Xie Lian's character after reading TGCF.
note 1, 隐忍 yǐnrěn resilience —
it was very painful but he persisted.
note 2, 勇氣 yǒngqì the art of giving up —
he chose to give up the responsibility that he could not take up, and that takes a kind of bravery.
note 3, 点润 diǎnrùn to moisten —
in those eight hundred years as a mortal he walked on earth and healed many souls.
note 4, 福泽 fúzé fortune —
he was never lucky, but that was because he gave up all that was of his for people to be their own gods, and not for him to be theirs.
note 5, a, 潇洒 xiāosǎ free —
he persisted in face of pain, and when everything is over he looks back and smiles.
note 5, b, 桃源 táoyuán to aspire —
the world is dark, but in the abyss and the coldness of it all he looks to the peach blossom trees, he looks to eden.
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Tolkien didn't make Frodo the protagonist to win the battle against Sauron. Frodo did not cast the ring into Mount Doom, he lost the fight against Morgorth's forces, and Gollum who was so taken by the darkness instead danced to death and by his last steps wrecked it.
Just as how LotR is but a sail in the sea of Eä's saga, Frodo is but one in the grand scheme of the Third Age, yet someone he is indeed, to be chosen as our protagonist of the overarching myth.
Because Tolkien is not celebrating victory. Or rather Victory Frodo did, along with the Fellowship of the Ring, in lauds of honour and chivalry and mighty strength he won it fair and square, in Tolkien's words a soldier unable to give the final blow had not succumbed to foe, for amid the injuries that broke body and mind he went far as he could, by virtue of his tenacious yet humanly will.
But to conquer he didn't, be it out of our author's christianly beliefs or the sighted ravages of war. There are scars in the heart that never can heal, and there are battles on earth too terrible to win that one, when they are over, feels no bliss but the mighty weight of self-recrimination and a cognisance of growth which sees the world through lenses perpetually changed.
Frodo is our protagonist, meekly resilient, humbly noble, yet mortally inadequate, and weak, and loving. He ends but a brief shadow cast in the annals of history, life changed but wounds never closed, darkness touched yet the light of Galadriel ever abiding.
The fellowship is beautiful and they all are, and Tolkien wrote about Hobbits of course because they are loveable, but loveable because they are unassuming, and inadequate, and humanly. In the face of heinous turmoil they see their valiant nobility, and in the depths of darkness hope prevails, fellowship endures.
The fellowship doesn't win. The hobbits weren't ever intended to win. Darkness steeps. But like Frodo he stood tall, he loved, and Samwise stepped in, and that was enough.
i know tolkien disabuses the notion of any allegory but there are things and let it be.
okay sorry i initially wrote this under the reblog but my comprehension skills were too poor and i was embarrassingly off topic so i better make my own post.
You know how I always said bring him home should not be in les mis, and it is not canon? I mean, it just occurred to me that even though Valjean didn’t save Marius at that time, he did eventually, and he even blessed Cosette and Marius’ marriage despite his unwillingness to do so, going so far as to proclaim his life’s work ended. And he saved Javert at that time, a far greater fear of his own (or was it that his love for Cosette surpassed that fear for his own imprisonment), showing how he has always been about love and redemption. It made me think, and I realise the tone of bring him home has never been wrong. You change some things and shift some timeframes in adaptations, and who am I to complain about one of the best numbers of this masterpiece?
(I didn’t get bring him home that much at the start. But someone close passed away, I looped it, and yeah, at times like those you suddenly see what the song is really about, and it’s beautiful.)
And when JVJ really sings it at the ending, it is so true to the story.
And same goes for the do you hear the people sing reprise at the finale. Because Victor Hugo wanted to write about fading into nihility. He wanted to write about death, about how lives don’t matter a hundred years down the road. Revolutions fade, compassion and genuine love and forgiveness reigns. But he wrote this in the 1850s, in the wake of France's 1848 revolution mess and he himself in self-imposed exile, the glaring failure of the second republic and the irony of napoleon III’s ascension shoved in his face. So he’s disillusioned with uprisings. He wants peace. But above all he still longs for liberty and egalite—at that point in the course of history we don’t even know if he still believes in the possibility of such a future. So instead Hugo writes about the fading of things, he writes about religion and he writes about love and compassion, he chooses to end the story with the fading life of Jean Valjean rather than the conviction of liberty of the ABC’s.
Despite all this, for just a little or a lot, in the heaven faraway and some time in their near future, for at least a brief respite of time, the chorus rings of a la volonte du peuple, and I suppose it will be what he wished for.
The musical is pretty congruent, all things considered.
(recommendation of the day: I was listening to Chris Jacobsen's BHH which made me write all this. So blame him.)
moral obligations yeah but also no I was rereading jean valjean's internal dialogue scene on his way to Arras (if I speak, I am condemned / if I stay silent, I am damned) and yes it is about the factory workers and the people of Montreuil-sur-Mer, it is about "my soul belongs to God I know, I made that bargain long ago", by faith of consequentialism if I could save the lives of a hundred people over one wretched man who is not going to do so, of course I would not condemn myself to life in gaol.
but also no.
he did not freaking want to go to the trial. All his way to Arras by horse he was pulling a Jarndyce and acting fricking like, "the wind blows, ergo Providence decrees I am not to go to Arras". "The court is full and everyone believed in the miserable convicted man. Of course I should just turn back and leave." All the time his heart was literally going "okay I'm just going to get there, take a look, everything's fine and dandy and I'll be headed my way back Montreuil-sur-Mer".
and that's almost what he did. He got there, shoved his mayor alias at the judge and got a first-class seat at the court treated with nothing but reverence, every one of his former inmates condemned the falsely tried man without a shadow of doubt, then, dang, jean valjean looked at the wretched guy confused and miserable at the front, and went,
"I cannot actually let him go to jail for life for a crime and more petty crimes he has not a single clue about. I just can't."
et voilà there he goes he stands up and calls all attention to him; he reveals himself to the world by spilling arbitrary secrets about his inmates and shocking the hall to silence and fervour. he walks away before anyone arrests him, says, "you know where to find me" and heads home.
It was never about saving one life vs. a hundred, about being righteous and doing what was honourable. He was dreadfully fearful of the incarceration that loomed ahead; at that moment before the wrongly accused man he simply realised he could not go on.
the crowd oohs and aahs, they epitomise disbelief, in three days they forget about him and dear old Monsieur Madeleine was but an unrepentant bonapartist, a convict and a thief most deservedly rearrested.
Montreuil-sur-Mer topples in weeks. Many years later at his death, Jean Valjean leaves something on his grave, but that, too, fades away.
the other reason for his confession: and must my name until i die / be no more than an alibi
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Excerpts about JRR Tolkien from the Diaries of Warren Lewis, elder brother of C. S. Lewis
(hbd tolkien!) None of that in the reddit link is my work. I merely discovered the link dated 7 years ago, and I beseech you, if you have yet to, this deserves a read.
J as Jack, C. S. Lewis; Tollers as Tolkien and the rest is pretty self-explanatory as the entries evolve.
/ (my thoughts ↡) /
because oh lord this has had me inquisitive and prying at the beginning, laughing out loud in the middle nodding in vehement agreement as the Inklings go through the Hobbit and the Rings. (Referring to Sam as Frodo's squire is now truly my favourite of Sam's titles). But there are tears at the end.
Tolkien takes off his hat to a deer on a walk and says "hail fallow well met; JRR goes from Tolkien to Ronald to Tollers, and Warren, with his brother, expresses their hidden indignation at new people inviting themselves into the Inklings (just as we all do in modern society). Warren then proclaims his love for the Sam-Frodo-Gollum passages of LotR, the anticipation of Tollers' LotR public reception and how he likes "the dwarf Gimli" and Sam Gamgee the most.
Then comes the souring of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien's friendship; J passes, they all age, and one day there's this passing remark on Tolkien's book sales to which his introspection admits, "I felt a swift and unworthy pang of envy that his success should have so far exceeded anything that ever came J’s way"—regrettably I do agree, in their legacies books on faith are seldom as marketed in today's economy.
It feels so surreal, reading his entries as time evolves and shapes; the asides of Tolkien in his diaries even as circumstance eventually drifts bonds apart: Tolkien yet remaining "Tollers". Last entry. Mrs Tolkien passes in November 1971, and he mentions Tollers once more: through his daughter to his address though, since fame and distance has made his abode unknown to the Lewises once more. Regardless, great warmth and care lingers, in their thoughts.
C. S. Lewis passed in 1963. Warren Lewis passed in April, 1973. Tolkien shortly after, in September of the same year.
LotR is not about Frodo—and that makes it beautiful.
Fellowship is about the fellowship. All nine of them. Then they break, and Two Towers is about Minas Morgul and Isengard, which gives us Frodo and an increasing amount of Sam; Isengard on Merry, Pippin and Treebeard (ents!) then later the rest of the troop; Returning of the King is Aragorn. The Lord of the Rings is, well, Sauron.
None of the titles is about Frodo.
At some point the narrative delves into everything but Hobbits, and the book ends with Sam.
Fellowship had me loving Frodo, from Book 1 on, and Aragorn and Gandalf. In the Two Towers and at the ending of Fellowship I loved Gimli and Legolas; Merry and Pippin were kind of, inadequate and woefully unprepared. Sam and Smeagol deserve a mention. In Book 5 Meriadoc and Peregrin I truly loved, and in Book 6 no more could be said of Sam Gamgee—then in the end all of them, Frodo and Aragorn, Bilbo and Gandalf and Galadriel, Elrond as they sail across setting sun to the ainur's musics of the West. Sam turns back, and he is with Rose and their young Elanor. Aragorn with Arwen rules Arnor and Gondor; Gimli and Legolas on their wild travels and Merry and Pippin on theirs. It’s a journey through and through, and in the end you fall in love all of them (Smeagol being the cutest name (i'm sorry fight me)); usually I just delve deep into fandoms with one single character but Tolkien makes them work, breathes life into all of them.
omg this took so long i'll proofread in the morning. written in chinese originally, under "read more". annotations on [google docs] with translations to come because there are too many.
(if you do chinese, skip to the cut! it is way better than the translation cri.)
⟶ tl;dr summary
it is fortunate that their ship name is coined Hualian and not Hua-xie. The flower withers, the petals fall. Yet there is a time for blossoms, a time for withers — if huaxie it really is, still it is befitting of their eight hundred years of separations and reencounters.
仙花垂憐，川城傾謝。
Heavenly flowers empathise and shed mercy; entire rivers and cities bow down in gratitude.
身在無間，心在桃源。
Whence the body dwells incessant the heart thrives beyond, content.
o n e .
He was pierced by a hundred swords. Thereafter, he offered to be pierced again. The nightly terrors that prowl wild in his dreams: he was ready to embrace it once more. The heart pierces, and yet it trembles.
t w o.
A thought experiment: if Wuming didn't die for Xie Lian at the rematerialisation of the hundred swords, would Xie Lian have accepted his second ascension?
The world is a wretched sea. Mortals, misery. Some people carry with them the weight of conscience, atlas or abyss on their shoulders as they edge stepwise towards the heavenly skies, for they know that the higher they go, the more power they wield in their hands to change the course of the stars. Lin Shu stands on the shoulders of legacy and demarcates Conscience on the ground. He steps into the encirclement he has carved: he holds himself hostage and falls into the nether realms of the incessant inferno, subject to an unyielding pursuit for bygone honours and nobility in store. It takes courage, to live like this.
But it also takes another kind of courage, to not live like this. Xie Lian wasn’t like Lin Shu. Dethroned, mortalised, buried and stripped of power and grace, he wandered on earth for eight hundred years. He did not save the destitute mortals, desolate and crying for help. He did not bestow on them the bountiful blessings, as what a god could do. The did-not-do’s — it takes in another courage to be him.
t h r e e.
Had Xie Lian really collected scraps these eight hundred years? To deny would do his memoir a disservice, but there is more to that. He served as the high priest of a kingdom, a general to an army; on the grapevine, the crown prince in white had played many roles on the stage of life, a hundred years here in the role of one, and a hundred from forth in the robes of another. In time, the tales of the one who inspired rose and ebbed, yet the legacies remain. He didn’t protect the people with his deified status, yet what endures is his compassion and mercy. In the rain, the figure clad in white walks past the world in joy and tears and touches the hearts he passes — this was his salvation, and his ascension to godhood.
f o u r.
At his second banishment, Xie Lian implores Jun Wu to assuage him of his merit and luck. Mortals light incense in exchange for blessings in supplication. Xie Lian disperses Fortune to earth instead, and disassembles Divinity for the common people to carve out blessings of their own lives.
The works of one cannot salvage the teetering constructs of a foundering world. The world is a tapestry of woven histories; people save the people as the tales unfurl. The stitches tangling in a sea of light, blessed faces lit up in the night by the millions of lanterns adorning the households of the earth, keeping it bright as stars in the sky. And it was so, what Xie Lian and Hua Cheng did.
f i v e.
The sword nears his neck: he is unfazed. The tenderness and gentleness of the noble spirit endures, staid as the meekness of nephrite jade. In the vicissitudes of temperaments, he sits, blasé; he does not concern himself with the triumphs and setbacks of life.
Clouds and storms wash across the world as he continues, with eased smiles and casual dialogue.
It is the most pitiable thing, of all in the world, gazing upon one who smiles placid in face of abject misery. He laughs in his affliction, yet is there such a thing, to be okay in utter wretchedness?
Fleeting moments of forlornness and joy all condensed in the time of a single gaze: his experiences refine him into a jade of the heart. The days of the ingenuous youth awash in ages past, gone were the luckiest teen of the kingdom, but the pureness in the eyes behind the sheaths of pain remain.
— I’m used to it, it matters no more;
who is there in this race with him but the immutable laws of nature in the crescent moon and wind?
The splendour surges, the crowds fete, the splendour falls — in the desert there is none: there is no glass of water waiting at your salvation. Dust and silt fork at each’s turn of fate; flies shovel across the path towards their better destinies. So long as one has feelings, has desires, how could one be truly free? The flower remains. The vista is unchanged. Yet the splendorous tower — the radiant memories of the past — bygones — and still he says that although the body dwells incessant, the heart thrives content. Where, pray, is the fount of the utopian peach blossom? How so, that the heart is at peace, in face of all this?
Yet he is well. His heart at peace. Where the heart lies, the peach blossoms spring.
+ 1
Xie Lian is this person, as such. Though the spring of the peach blossoms have long since dwindled, he hopes, towards.
Full annotations found here. Untranslated for now because there are simply too many; I suggest copying and pasting into the browser if you are interested in the poetry and verses cited. Many of them are not used as per their original meaning, however, so it is 99% on me if you caught the reference but did not understand it.
Anyhow, a note on the two most important allusions, because there is value in such:
[1] 身在无间，心在桃源。Whence the body dwells incessant, the heart thrives beyond, content.
A suggested translation of "Body in abyss, heart in paradise" because I vehemently abhor the official tl.
Incessant hints to the nirvana of buddhism. I didn't play with the idea of using paradise like in John Milton's poem to encapsulate the utopian ideals of Jin dynasty Tao Yuanming's Taoist Peach Blossom Spring visions. In Tao's essay he expresses the notion "I can live in a peaceful provincial paradise where the peach blossoms spring and forget about worldly matters", which is not exactly the biblical Eden. Probably owing to the idea that Xie Lian never actively sought out an extraterrestrial, heavenly, peach-blossom-spring paradise, I did not translate it literally here but figuratively, though opinion probably divides on this one.
[2] 纵武陵人远，烟锁秦楼。
念武陵人远，烟锁秦楼。——《凤凰台上忆吹箫·香冷金猊》 李清照
李氏取自：
烟锁凤楼无限事，茫茫，鸾镜鸳衾两断肠。——《南乡子·细雨湿流光》 冯延巳
Extreme liberties taken. Li Qingzhao wrote the first poem from the perspective of a lover. She sits at her own chambers reminiscing about her lost lover. This in turn was alluding to Feng Yansi's poem. Both works reference a tower/chamber where two mythical lovers spent their time at before ascension. As such, this phrase denotes here something unattainable from past memories and someone locked in perpetuum, in stasis, waiting for something to come.
In relation to this line on the chamber/tower by Li Qingzhao, a direct allusion to Tao Yuanming's peach blossom utopia was also alluded to in Li's poem in the antecedent line, despite both being used to speak of romance and not sociopolitical utopian ideals. The sleep-deprived me thus thought it "apt" to cite both lines in the writing to express Xie Lian's longing for the peach blossom paradise, despite said paradise being no longer extant on Earth, and him being in incessant hell. The peach blossoms in question tie in with mxtx's allusion of the peach blossom spring in tgcf's famous quotation; thus explains the reason for all the convoluted quoting.
this much for now. I hope something makes sense, at least. The english version is very, very figurative since I realised the chinese version was nigh impossible to literally translate without dedicating a relatively great amount of time to it. I don't know how this will be received at all, but why hi, and hope it is something at least xD
