![]() ![]() Like the tree that Niggle spends so many hours, then days, then years painting, this little sapling that can be read out-loud in a half-hour’s time sprouts into dozens of different branches of meditation.įor example, the reader must consider that Niggle disregards the practical for the sake of the beautiful, but that his neighbor, Parish, disregards the beautiful for the sake of the practical. Tolkien, though, was a great mind, so his story is more than an ambiguous injunction that we live each day as if it were our last. It takes no great mind to observe the inevitability of death, and that despite its inevitability many of us will face the journey unprepared. He knew he would have to start sometime, but he did not hurry with his preparations.įrom the story’s first sentence, that Niggle’s impending journey is an allegory for death is unmistakable. He did not want to go, indeed the whole idea was distasteful to him but he could not get out of it. There once was a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make. Tolkien opens this short story by introducing us to Niggle by means of his mortality: Tolkien’s autobiographical “Leaf by Niggle.” A thread of this color runs through J.R.R. And no one is promised a tomorrow to finish those things that ought to be done today. ![]() The acts we perform today really will echo in eternity, for no one can turn back the clock to undo those things he has done, or to do the things he has left undone. It is wise rather than morbid for us to meditate on this reality each morning as we prepare for the day ahead. “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” he cries, and indeed, Maximus argues that the fact of death is all the more reason to fight without cowardice for as we are in this life, so are we in the next. Urging his troops to manly fortitude in the face of Germanic barbarians, General Maximus of the 2000 film, Gladiator does not downplay the certainty that some of his Romans are about die. ![]()
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