The Ending is the Best Part

Endings are always seen as a sad thing—the story is over, someone has died, a friendship has ended, or all of the above. These are most likely sad because something is finished, and the reader does not get anymore of that thing from the actual author. The journey is over, and there is nothing you can do about it. I would argue the opposite, that endings are the best and most important part of any journey.

            Take The Lord of the Rings as an example. The ending of Sam and Frodo’s story is a fond farewell before Frodo goes off to the Undying Lands. Though they will never see each other again, they exchange meaningful words and gifts. While sad, it is the best for both of them because of the closure it brings them both.

            Another ending within the book is that of the fellowship. That story ends effectively when Frodo and Sam leave and Boromir dies. This ending is also sad because of abandonment and death, but serves an important and greater purpose. It is also necessary because of the individual jobs of each character. The end is an essential component, while sad because the fellowship stood for hope and light, is crucial due to the greater importance of the mission.

            Similar to the great many missions discussed in the book, the overall ending of The Lord of the Rings—as in the ending of typed out and published in books by J.R.R. Tolkien—serves a greater purpose as well and should not be seen as sad. For the readers, the end of the books is necessary to gain closure and explanation. Without an ending, one would not know the fate of the Shire, what Sam does after Frodo is gone, and what the great elf lords and ladies did. More than that, the ending shows the true colors of each character. Rather than following Frodo, his dear master, to the Undying Lands, Sam remains in Middle Earth to be with his wife and children as well as look after the Shire and record the his story. This reflects Sam’s true and noble character of always putting others before himself and staying true to what his duty is no matter the emotional price or pain. Anther instance of an ending revealing the true quality of the characters is in the breaking of the fellowship. Aragorn could have forced Frodo to stay with him as he fought the army of Uruk-hai. This, if successful, would have meant that Merry and Pippen would have been abandoned in favor of Frodo’s mission. It also most likely would have resulted in Gollum’s death and the death of other fellowship members. Rather than doing that, Aragorn let the fellowship break, allowing Frodo and then Sam to leave, burying Boromir, and banding together with Gimli and Legolas to find and save Merry and Pippen. Showing his true quality, Aragorn facilitates a devastating ending to create the possibility of hope. 

            In the words of Sam Gamgee during the end of The Twin Towers,  “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

            In that quote, Sam really captures the human fear and dread of endings. Sometimes, stories are scary and sad, so how could the ending be ok? However, even with the fear, one has to stick it out to the end—even if you didn’t completely understand what happened or why. Endings matter because they teach someone to not turn back, to push past the difficulties, the sadness, the strife, to work to the end to see what happens and be glad you did. People hate endings because it reminds us that the story is not really real. Endings conclude the lives and characters you loved; they finish a great story.

            However, the conclusion does not necessarily mean the story dies. As discussed in class, dedicated readers can continue by thinking about the characters’ lives after the story ends, and fill in the blank spaces themselves. This allows for a closer connection to the story, and an appreciation for an ending because where one story and one author ends, another can begin.

            These qualities: revealing the true colors behind a character, providing closure for the reader, as well as allowing a new story and author to pick up the strands make endings the best and most important part of a story. While the written words are finished, it is something that is necessary because all stories must end at some point otherwise they wouldn’t be good. Endings, like those Sam mention, are so important because those final moments and deeds are really what stick with a reader and make them think on the story after—showing how strong and important they truly are.  

            On a more personal note, lets examine the end-of-class party today. While sad that it is over and that reading and talking about The Lord of the Rings will no longer be a daily part of my life, the party did provide a lot of closure. I got to hear the results of the ring game, listen to awesome presentations by my peers, and see my professor and TA in full regalia and force. It was an event that showed the true colors of my classmates as they realized it was the end—taking happy and satisfied photographs, thanking our professor, and having light-saber duels between a hobbit and Sauron (there’s a sentence I never thought I would write). It shows that while difficult and sad, endings are best because of the closure and finality they bring, as well as the promise for a personalized future—whether that is taking pictures of yourself proudly wearing the ring Professor Fulton-Brown bestowed on to you, continuing on final projects long after they are due, or watching The Lord of the Rings with friends gained from class next year. 

KH

An Elegy for an Angel

Much has already been written about Tolkien's treatment of death.  I think we're so acclimated to the 'death-as-gift' mechanic of his world that we've forgotten just how jarring that notion is - at least, I have.  We've seen how death and the short lifespan of humans in Tolkien's world becomes the impetus for change and history.  It also becomes an impetus for art.

Not -the- impetus for art.  The Elves' songs of praise are among the first sub-creative pieces that appear in Arda.  But aside from the simple desire for power that is characteristic of Morgoth and Sauron, one of the strongest driving forces behind the major characters seems to be grief.  Loss is central to the motivations of many of the First Age's greatest. Feanor and the Exiles, Turin, Beren and Luthien; each are characterized by a single moment that fills them with lifelong grief.  Fast forward to the fall of Numenor, for which sad songs are spun for thousands of years afterward.  And nobody escapes the War of the Ring without cause for sorrow.  But death in Tolkien's world is not quite the same as death in ours.  Is there then a difference in how they mourn?

I don't believe so, though in these stories, the mourning ends up having a larger purpose.  In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien eulogizes the major characters he kills off in the words of other characters who bore witness to it.  Aragorn and Legolas end off Boromir's funeral with an impromptu song in his honor.  Why do they do this?  The text of the eulogy itself addresses the winds, asking for tidings of Boromir, and revealing each wind's answer.  It seems to be a commentary on a subject of great interest to Tolkien - the transition from history to storytelling to myth.  We are explicitly presented with the moment where Boromir's life goes from empirical reality to a poetic story.  Gimli does not sing a verse for the East wind, for doing so would allow the influence of Sauron to corrupt the memory of Boromir, and risk turning his life-story towards his own purposes.  As concerned as Tolkien was with the dangers of myth in our world, he imbued his characters with the same concern.

The account of Theoden's eulogy displays the continuation of this process.  To my untrained eye, it looks a good deal like the introduction to Beowulf, or more generally, an Anglo-Saxon poem.  But the tone of the song is historical; the listener is not driven to mourn Theoden personally, but to understand how deeply Theoden was mourned.  It is a song that does not stand by itself, but is given meaning if the listener is already instructed about Theoden's life.  It is not a eulogy - it is a part of a story.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to justify this interpretation via Lewis's toolshed metaphor.  Imagine a Middle-Earth historian, seeking to understand Theoden the historical figure.  They may be tempted to focus on primary documents - edicts that he signed, direct verifiable quotations, letters - but the eulogy and its poetic descendants, though they allow an entirely different and less empirical form of understanding, would allow them to examine the immediate and long-term cultural impact that Theoden had.  And it would allow the historian to learn how Theoden's contemporaries were driven to feel by his life and loss.

So is that the purpose of mourning - to translate a living being into a mythic figure?  To yield art from reality?  Of course not; it has the capacity to do so and serves that role for certain characters, but the eulogy for Gandalf reveals a sort of mourning that we are all more personally familiar with.  When the hobbits are in Lothlorien, constructing a song in memory of Gandalf, many of the verses don't evoke historical events, or deliver 'news' - they're expressions of the hobbits' personal memories of the wizard.  And these especially include happy and joyful memories.  Every funeral I've been to, whether for someone who lived a long, full life, or for someone whose life was tragically cut short, had at least a partial aim to celebrate the joy brought about in life by the one who had died.  Frodo sings of Gandalf's tragic death, but in his next breath, Sam sings of the simple happiness of Gandalf's fireworks.

I'm sure this isn't a groundbreaking opinion, but I absolutely adore the description at the Field of Cormallen, which reads 'their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.'  It is a feeling understood, I think, by anyone who has known intense grief.  And it captures the way in which grief and joy are two sides of the same coin.  It is evocative of eucatastrophe - but I feel like it goes beyond eucatastrophe.  It is the inherent complexity of emotion.  For how can you grieve somebody without remembering, and thus feeling, the joy they brought you?  And how can you be joyful without the memory of the sadness which the joy has driven away?  We cry at weddings as often as we cry at funerals.  And a song of praise and a eulogy require the same capacity to feel.

A cheesy old saying goes "Don't be sad because it's over - be happy because it happened."  I would like to amend this to "Embrace your grief, which came from an End - but also embrace the joy that came with it."

-AJ Corso

The Lord of the Rings: Fundamentally Catholic?

     Of the many insights Tolkien’s letters give into his legendarium, one of the more initially puzzling claims from his letters we’ve discussed in class this quarter is Tolkien’s statement on the inherent religiosity of his work. Namely, in a letter to a close friend about the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes that the work is “of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” (Letters 172). What does Tolkien mean by this claim, particularly in light of the fact that The Lord of the Rings clearly lacks organized religion in the manner of the modern world and does not explicitly reference Catholic teachings or writings?
     There is certainly no reference to religion in the traditional sense in The Lord of the Rings (there are not Churches or Temples to be found), let alone specifically Catholicism, but Tolkien’s letters make it clear that such organized religion is not necessary for him to consider his work “fundamentally . . . . Catholic.” There is an interesting passage in a letter to Michael Tolkien in which J.R.R. Tolkien writes that “you cannot maintain a religion without a church and ministers; and that means professionals: priests and bishops – and also monks. The most precious wine must (in this world) have a bottle” (Letters 337). This statement suggests that, for Tolkien, the critical aspect of religion is separate from its institutions, the wine inside an often imperfect bottle. Although these institutions are vital in our world, in other circumstances they may not be. Further, Tolkien elaborates in another letter that “the religious element [of The Lord of the Rings] is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” rather than in any sort of religious institution (Letters 172). Thus, it seems quite clear that, for Tolkien, any religious or Catholic element is inherent in the story’s fabric rather than in any obvious, explicit discussion in the story.
     How then might Tolkien consider his work fundamentally Catholic? Certainly there are surface nods to the Catholic tradition; the date of Sauron’s fall is said to be March 25th, the date commonly assigned to the crucifixion of Christ. There are a variety of obvious themes that also evoke Catholic ideas. Sam’s trek up Mount Doom carrying Frodo, who himself is bearing the burden of the ring, draws to mind Christ’s journey under the cross at his crucifixion; it must be noted however that, as Frodo in some senses fails in the last stage of his journey, a sharp departure from the story of the crucifixion, this similarity does not descend into religious allegory. The invocations by various characters in The Lord of the Rings of the name “Elbereth” and Tolkien’s treatment of the Lady Galadriel is reminiscent of Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary, particularly before the second Vatican Council (when The Lord of the Rings was written). Indeed, Tolkien himself mentions this similarity in one of his letters, writing that he owes “much of [the] character to Christian and Catholic teaching and the imagination about Mary” (Letters 320). He goes on to also to write however that “actually Galadriel was a penitent,” again emphasizing that while parallels exist between Catholic teaching and Tolkien’s imagination, he does not rely on allegory in any way. The language Sam uses to describe Lembas is highly reminiscent of Tolkien’s description of the Eucharist in his letters and various Biblical passages. “The lembas had a virtue without which [Sam and Frodo] would long ago have lain down to die,” Tolkien writes. “[T]his waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as [they] relied on it alone” for “it fed the will, and it gave strength to endure . . . beyond the measure of mortal kind” (Lord 1036). Of the Eucharist, Tolkien writes that it is the “only cure” for failing faith, made more potent by “frequency,” with seven times a week being “more nourishing than seven times at interval” (Letters 338-339). Lembas and the Eucharist are both curative and made powerful through reliance upon them. The entire concept of thinking of bread in this manner also has close ties to various biblical passages in which Jesus refers to himself as the “bread of life” that will grant eternal life to those who eat of it (John 6). Thus, although Tolkien insists that his work is not meant to be allegorical, certain surface similarities and deeper religious symbols are evoked in his works.
     Tolkien’s insistence that his work is “fundamentally” Catholic, as well as his statement that religion has been interwoven into the very fabric of the story, suggests that he was considering the religious element of his story on a deeper level. In one of his letters he writes that the “purpose of life . . . is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and be moved by it to praise and thanks” and that “devoted study [of the Universe] may be one of the ways of honoring him” (Letters 400). In short, Tolkien seems to advocate increasing our understanding of the world around us as a method of praising God and so fulfilling our purpose in life, a purpose which, Tolkien writes in the same letter, can only be found in relation to God. If Tolkien believed that fulfilling the purpose set out for oneself by God involves experiencing the world around oneself and so coming to know God and praise him, then Frodo and Sam’s quest in The Lord of the Rings might have called to mind a pilgrimage of sorts to Tolkien. Certainly, Tolkien believed in the power of journeys to shape people until new and better versions of themselves. After discussing the profound transformative effects of journeys on people who undertake them, Tolkien likens man to a “seed with its innate vitality and heredity, its capacity to grow and develop” and “in some degree also” to “a gardener” who can change himself through act of will. It is for this reason, he goes on to say, that the hobbits were sent on their journey (Letters 239-240). Through their journey they come to know the world and are thus shaped by it, something it is entirely plausible Tolkien would have seen as a religious experience.
     Thus, it is certainly possible to find evidence for the profound religious influences Tolkien professes his work to possess. Whether Tolkien himself would have held that the influences mentioned above are what makes his work “fundamentally” Catholic is another question entirely. Other than some mentions of the Virgin Mary in his letters, Tolkien does not discuss at length links between prominent Catholic imagery—the Eucharist and the Crucifixion—and his work. Further, the religious link that can be made to the hobbits’ journey is only one possible interpretation of such a transformation. Certainly, people in stories, myths, and legends—everything from Lyra in Pullman’s His Dark Materials to Marlin in Finding Nemo to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—often go on quests and discover truths, but such journeys need not be tied to religion or Christianity specifically.
-EI

Holy Bible. The New American Bible, Fireside Catholic Publishing, 2010. 

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter & Christopher                      Tolkien, Houghton Mifflen, 2000, New York.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. HarperCollins E-Books, 2002.

Varda and Mary - sorry, Tolkien, I'm pretty sure this one's just allegory.

From a merely structural perspective, Tolkien seems to be heavily alluding to a connection of sorts between the Aratar Varda and the Virgin Mary; while Tolkien consistently rejects allegory on a fundamental level, Varda’s position within the Elves’ common history, as well as certain speech patterns presented to the reader make a substantial tie borderline irrefutable. While Varda is in never explicitly referred to as a mother in any way, shape, or form (along with all of the other Valar, she is technically childless), Varda occupies a unique space in Elven legend that firmly places her in the role of a collective mother, the primary trait of Mary. Additionally, several poems addressed to Varda in her Elbereth nomenclature very directly mimic the lingual patterns of Catholic prayers, one of the more directly forthright reflections of Tolkien’s religion in the Lord of the Rings universe.

To briefly descend into the pseudobiology of the LotR universe, the Awakening of the Elves – what can be regarded as their “birth” as a species, for lack of a better phrase – involved three Elves “waking up” in Cuiviénen, more or less fully formed and functional from the get-go, outside the lack of a common language.

“Imin, Tata and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn.”

As the Elves, created by Eru himself, seemed to gestate in a sleep-like state, waking up fully functional, I’ve always found the early Elves to be somewhat biologically reminiscent of creatures that hatch from eggs – particularly birds, especially considering their normally arboreal lifestyle (but that’s more or less beside the point here). Elves “hatched” from their slumber, and much like birds, woke up to meet an empty nest without their biological parent in visible sight. Many birds have been classified as performing something called filial imprinting upon birth, which, as thoroughly studied by Konrad Lorenz, involves a newborn bird characterizing essentially the first thing it sees upon exiting the egg as its mother, and retaining that association for the entirety of its lifespan.

In the case of Imin, Tata, and Enel, the first thing they saw upon their birth were “the stars”, which, in the LotR universe, are essentially the manifest representations of Varda herself. These “newborn” elves absolutely imprinted themselves onto the stars in the sky; as they grew up and eventually met Varda herself, this imprinting became transferred in a sense to Varda, as the incarnate representation of the stars.

Their fascination goes substantially further than even mere study itself, as during the initial establishment of Quenya, soon after the newborn elves gain consciousness, the prefix “El” can be interchangeably used (in most cases) between “Elf” and “Star”, or in Tolkien’s words, “It is not surprising that the Edain, when they learned Sindarin, and to a certain extent Quenya also, found it difficult to discern whether words and names containing the element el referred to the stars or to the Elves.” The elves refer to themselves as “Eldar”, which forms a linguistic backbone for all sorts of their linguistic elements, yet also create names like “Elrond” and “Elros”, which employ the “El” prefix in its “star” connotation. This combination seems to demonstrate an incredibly deep tie between the elves self-identity and Varda, almost mimicking that of the reverential relation between children and their mothers. This “collective mother” situation seems to be very reminiscent of the way that the Virgin Mary is treated in the Christian religion, from the self-referential side of things (naming like half of the female royalty from the past millennium after Mary) to the way people refer to Mary during prayer. Additionally, the “Virgin” aspect seems to stay similarly in effect with relatively minimal translation, as Varda (amongst all the rest of the Valar) is entirely childless, yet mother to an entire race of creatures. Certain of Mary’s titles also seem directly reminiscent of Varda’s role in Tolkien’s mythology: both “Star of the Sea” and “Morning Star” seem like they could be easily transferred to describe Varda, much as Varda’s nicknames of “Holy Queen” or “Star-Queen” could just as well refer to Mary.

Another parallel between Mary and Varda comes in the specific way that Tolkien phrases the various characters’ prayers to Varda. The dominant form comes in the poem “A Elbereth Gilthoniel”, an elvish hymn composed in Iambic tetrameter. Frodo invokes the latter half of the poem as the Ringwraiths are about to slay him on the peak of Weathertop:

“O Elbereth Star-kindler,
from heaven gazing afar,
to thee I cry now beneath the shadow of death!
O look towards me, Everwhite!”

This prayer of salvation almost directly mimics the structure and wording of the Salve Regina, one of the more important prayers addressed to Mary:

“To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve:
to thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, most gracious Advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us,
and after this our exile,
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

Between the goal of the prayer – to appeal to a heavenly mother that’s supposed to be watching over the prayer’s actions – and the invocations of “crying out” and “looking”, A Elbereth Gilthoniel is an almost direct translation of the Salve Regina into Tolkien’s LotR world, much as Varda seems to be a translation of sorts of the Virgin Mary.

On a final note (not necessarily to add to the above comparison, but just something I’ve noticed), one particular side effect of the Elves’ immortality makes this comparison feel a bit odd to me. The numerous characters we see talking to each other and invoking Varda’s name throughout the Lord of the Rings proper – from Frodo, to Sam, to Aragorn, to Legolas – appear to be using it as a sort of epithet, much in the way modern language has adopted similarly holy individuals’ names. However, while our world is separated from these characters we invoke by hundreds of generations, a number of characters in the LotR world have directly interacted with Varda (the foremost being Elrond and the Istari), so having them hear her name invoked in such a sense must seem somewhat surreal to those characters.

Works Cited

Tolkien, J. R. R., and Christopher Tolkien. The Silmarillion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Print.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.

Tolkien, Christopher. The War of the Jewels. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1994, Print.

Eucatastrophe, Language, Narrative Pacing, and Worship

Given Tolkien’s area of study, one might expect him to be fairly optimistic about the ability of language to capture mystic experience.  However, he states in several places his dissatisfaction with words as a vehicle for portraying such experience.  In Letter 89, writing to Christopher, he attempts to describe a vision of the Light of God, and qualifies it multiple times, describing it as “very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself.”  A little further on, he fears he has “failed to convey” the comfort he took from this vision, and the passage as a whole is sprinkled with interjections and stumbling attempts to make clear his experience. 

            Should we be surprised that such an eloquent wordsmith has trouble conveying certain types of mystical experience?  I don’t think so.  As Tolkien makes clear elsewhere, eucatastrophe is a particular emotion that we come upon primarily through story – it’s in fact inherent to narrative.  Unlike other emotions, which can be conveyed more or less directly through a single passage, eucatastrophe is a kind of release which requires the ratcheting up of narrative tension and the investment over time into the fate of characters.  It is “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.”  For joy to spring out of a situation where all seems lost (at what NaNoWriMo creator Chris Baty calls the “85% mark” of a story), we must first have had a full narrative buildup to that point.

            In my view, the passage in which Tolkien most powerfully invokes this sensation for the reader is in Book VI, Chapter IV, when the gathered host of Gondor hear the lay of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom: “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold… until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”  Notably, the metaphors here are fairly simple; the emotive power of the passage comes mainly from the sense of closure and release after 900 pages of emotional investment in Sam and Frodo’s journey.  The laughter and tears, both of the collected host and of the reader, only make sense in the context of the quest’s fulfillment.

            Jorge Luis Borges’ paragraph-length short story “On Exactitude In Science” describes an empire so invested in cartography that the only acceptably exact map of it is the full size of the empire itself.  Borges sketches it humorously: “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”  But the conceit resembles a suggestion we toyed with in class yesterday: that eucatastrophe is meaningful and powerful to the degree which it maps onto the overarching narrative of the universe – the Christian story and the eucatastrophe contained within it are the territory, and the “map” of LOTR is effective in part because its sheer scale is closer to that story’s scale than many other works of myth. 

            Tolkien indirectly notes something similar to this in Letter 328, when he describes his realization that LOTR isn’t entirely his own work.  As discussed in class and as Tolkien correctly describes, Middle-earth is pervaded by “some sort of faith [which] seems to be everywhere without a visible source, like light from an invisible lamp.”  We struggled in class to discern what that source is: I’d argue that in part it’s the ability of the story to portray eucatastrophe in a manner parallel to that of the Christ story.

            We’ve seen that Tolkien has little faith in the power of individual descriptions to draw out eucatastrophe or to describe transcendent experience, and instead relies on narrative that mirrors the Christian one to create that emotional response in us.  But are there other ways in which eucatastrophe is exhibited?  Tolkien doesn’t explicitly say so, but Letter 54, again to Christopher, suggests that liturgy gives us that experience.  “If you have [the Latin praises] by heart you never need for words of joy.”  Liturgical invocations such as the Gloria Patri are short chunks of text, but they carry embedded in them reference to the whole Christian story.  Liturgy is, like narrative, seasonal and sequential: even when one invokes it by rote and without conscious engagement, it ties one to the narrative pattern of Christianity.  If Tolkien is correct in saying that “the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story,” then both narrative story and liturgical story can contain eucatastrophic references. 

            Indeed, Tolkien conceives of Man as storyteller: what makes us human is in part our storytelling nature.  Therefore, Man must be redeemed “in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story.”  Laughter and tears comingled aren’t simply a high aesthetic experience or a cathartic necessity: to Tolkien they are Man’s natural response to his own story, to the story of the universe, that of redemption.

-- Santi Ruiz