On the corner there was a woman handing out pamphlets and shouting,
Are you in de stock market?
It will be brought down
Because Jesus says it will!
The end times are here, ho yeah!
An' if you don't believe me, it's
in de Book of Revelations.
Once back on campus, I remembered that I had last night discovered that Hunt had Tolkein's collection of essays/lectures "The Monsters and the Critics" and decided to go over there and check it out, expecting to just read "A secret vice". Instead, perhaps predictably, it sucked me in. Almost more effectively than the Lord of the Rings (and certainly more so per word!) the various essays, each in their own particular way, convey the deep desire for and continual pursuit of some particular sort of unreachable beauty in and through language. "A Secret Vice" finds it principally in the creation of new languages; "English and Welsh" in the languages of the Celts; "On Fairy Stories" in the deeply flowing river of mythological energy and passion and sadness and knowing regret that drove his elves, for which he (or they?) found language and speech and poems and myths.
