I felt this way recently when listening to The Yes Album, an album that long ago stood pretty much at the centre of my musical world. I saw that version of Yes (still with Tony Kaye on keyboards) and the subsequent line-up (with Rick Wakeman) live at the Free Trade Hall and they blew me away, big time. And now I just can’t relate to the grandiose element of it all, and there’s an awful lot of that – witness the daw daw daw daw daaaw, da da da da daw, da da da daw, da da da dah dah opening of Perpetual Change which now makes me cringe ever so slightly, more of a wince really, with embarrassment.
And I’ve been thinking of a similar phenomenon I experienced in relation to Tolkien’s greatest work The Lord of the Rings, particularly since posting a comment noting I now found it pretty much unreadable at the end of an especially fine post by the Hierophant over here. So what happened in the years between a fourteen-year-old me discovering there was actually a mega-sequel to that great story The Hobbit that was read to us at primary school by a wonderfully inspired teacher (we made glove puppets of Thorin & co!!) and roughly the same me in my late twenties embarking on a reading I thought I was going to enjoy and giving up about a third of the way in?
Essentially it was my inability to relate to Tolkien’s ‘heroic’ style – not the hobbity bits which still worked for me, despite the occasional jarring tweeness – but the noble Aragorny stuff which seemed to have no sense of irony at all. Those high and mighty elves who once seemed the height of cool had grown tedious. But the loss, I’m aware, was mine. So I’ll end my criticisms there since I don’t particularly want others to share in it.
4 comments:
Yes, I find what you've said unbearably sad. It's a loss, it's yours, but perhaps you'll find it (the ability to enjoy The Lord of the Rings) back again. I'd once thought that my love of Roald Dahl was lost, but recently I've found it back again. But you don't find all of Tolkien unreadable do you? Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle are small delights to savour.
Now you come to mention the 'smaller' books you have a point. On that scale Tolkien works, which is why I think the hobbits are the great triumph of the epic stuff. They humanise it (which, oddly, the humans don't.) Good to know you still enjoy Dahl. Now there's someone whose magic persists despite all his faults (possibly becuase of them.)
Haha, that's because the hobbits are the real humans. They were the closest to Tolkien's heart! He once said, "I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).."
Tolkien is a bit like the old, unwieldy and slightly rusty tent-peg that holds down the tent which is fantasy fiction. It works, it may not be the best solution, but everyone knows it's one of the keepers.
You'd only realise what was missing if it went away.
*grin*
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