The Tolkien Reader Who Reads Tolkien

The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien. My friend Chris said those words quite unexpectedly one day. We were sitting on the beach searching for gray whales. The gray whale migrates along the west coast of America, on their way to and from their breeding grounds in Mexico and their feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas.

When looking for whales, what you mainly look for are spouts. That is the easiest way to spot a whale. A misty spray off in the distance. You might see a darkened hump against the blue of the ocean. But sometimes they are created by the swells and surges of the water, and they can be misleading, so recognizing the spray is the more successful method.

What I like to do is clear my mind and simply take it all in. Some people, when looking for whales, search desperately and wildly, swinging their heads back and forth. They look here. They look there. They’re not really sure what to look for. They think that every shadow they see is a whale, and there are a lot of shadows on the ocean. But it seems they see fewer whales. If any at all. Whereas just being open and receptive to the ocean out front always seemed to work better for me.

I like to clear my mind, as I said, kind of an emptying of extraneous thoughts. Like one would do while meditating. I didn’t know much about meditating back then, when I was a teenager. I did know, however, that truly emptying the mind is pretty much impossible, so when random thoughts did invade, as they always did, I usually thought of music. I didn’t think of blues runs, complicated jazz patterns, or rock-and-roll beats. I usually thought of Beethoven. Yeah, I know. Who thinks of Beethoven when searching for whales? But try it the next time you go whale watching.

I would think of the Moonlight Sonata. I would run the arpeggiated melody in my mind as my eyes scanned the water. I would picture a whale swimming along, and I would imagine that it was also thinking of Beethoven. I know a whale cannot think of Beethoven as it swims through the ocean, but hey, it’s my imagination, so why not?

But that day, Chris gave me something different to think about. It was spring, and he and I were sitting in front of his house, which was just down the beach from mine. The house I lived in stood on stilts like a pier out over the water. We could feel the house vibrate as the waves smacked into the pilings during high tide. Chris’s house was right on the beach. He could open his door and step right out onto the sand.

Anyway, on that particular day, I was running some Beethoven in my mind and scanning the ocean. The sand was warm. The sun was on our backs. The ocean glittered in the morning light. I had my legs stretched out in front of me. I could have sat there not thinking about anything more than gray whales and Beethoven for a long time.

We had been watching whales together since we were kids. Typically, when one of us spotted a whale, we didn’t tell the other, “Hey, look.” We just knew that the other had seen it too. We didn’t talk much when looking for whales and we never counted how many we spotted. Some days, we might spot several whales. Other days we might only see a couple, and other days none. That didn’t matter to us.

We were usually quite content to just sit in silence, looking out to sea for long spells. But on this particular day, out of the blue, he said, well, you know what he said, “The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien.”

It took me a moment to come out of my reverie. Then I turned my head and looked at him. He was staring out at the sea with a kind of entranced, dreamy expression on his face.

“What?”

“The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien.”

“Are you reading The Tolkien Reader?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

The Tolkien Reader is a collection of stories and poems written by J.R.R. Tolkien. You know, the guy who wrote the Lord of the Rings books about hobbits and elves and magicians in Middle- earth. The Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers. The Return of the King. And of course, the one that started it all, The Hobbit. I had read them all, in order. Chris had, too.

“Then what the heck are you talking about? The Tolkien Reader-”

“Who reads Tolkien,” he finished.

I gave him one of those inquiring looks that said, what the…?

He turned and looked at me. “I was just sitting here looking for whales,” he said. “By the way, you did see that one spy hop out beyond the kelp a few minutes ago, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That was a nice one,” he said. “Anyway, I was just sitting here and that line came to me. And I thought, well, you know how I get sometimes. Sometimes I get these strange thoughts. So, I thought, hey, that’s kind of unheralded.”

“Unheralded?” I questioned. “Who are you? Shakespeare?”

“Anyway,” he went on. “My thought. It was kind of sudden and (he looked at me and emphasized the word) unheralded and, you know, philosophical.”

“Philosophical,” I said. “Okay. But, I mean, come on. The Tolkien Reader-”

“Who reads Tolkien,” he finished again.

“What is so philosophical about that?”

“Think about it,” he said. He looked back out at the ocean. After a moment, he turned and looked at me. “Think about it,” he said again. It seemed pretty obvious what it meant, but he told me to think about it, so okay, I was thinking about it.

It wasn’t making much sense to me, so I tried to clear my mind again. Maybe that would help. Maybe if I ran some Beethoven through my mind, the significance of his little saying would become clear. Maybe the meaning would kind of trickle in like honey dripping off a spoon. Maybe the sense of it would suddenly appear like a gray whale’s spout in the distance. So, I sat there on the sand and looked out at the ocean, and I tried to think about The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien. And Beethoven.

My mother was a concert pianist, and she once told me that while listening to Beethoven, especially his solo piano music, I should picture the notes ascending and descending a flight of stairs. “If you look at the musical notes on a page,” she told me, “it can appear like they are moving up and down a series of steps.”

Then I realized that I wasn’t thinking about The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien, I was thinking about staircases and sheet music. Okay, stop, I told myself. Chris is probably laughing at me, I thought. He knows I’m sitting here, and my mind is running a hundred miles an hour.

Stop thinking.

Cogitation. Elucidation. Explanation. Consideration. Obfuscation.

Stop it!

Then I spotted another whale. This one was pretty close in, just inside the breakers. I could see the whale’s back. It was gray and covered in barnacles, rough and white in the sun. A few minutes later, I saw another spout a little further out by the kelp beds. I wondered if that one was the same whale as the one that had been closer in. Maybe it was swimming around casually scooping up mouthfuls of the sandy bottom in search of shellfish, little crabs, isopods and small shrimp to eat. Maybe it was thinking about Beethoven.

It then occurred to me, now I’m thinking about whales and what they eat. This wasn’t working. I figured I’d take a shot at it and just go with what seemed the obvious answer.

“Okay, so,” I began. “The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien.”

He didn’t say anything. He was looking out at the ocean. He seemed in a kind of trance. I waved my hand in front of his face.

“Hey, Shakespeare.”

“Huh?”

“I think I have it,” I said. “The Tolkien Reader, as we both know, is a book by Tolkien.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And,” I continued.  “If you’re reading The Tolkien Reader.”

“I’m not,” he interrupted. “But I have.”

“I know. Damnit, pay attention. This is your Zen koan, not mine.”

“Hey, I like that,” he said. “Maybe it is a Zen koan. That’s kinda cool.”

“Anyway,” I said. “If you are reading The Tolkien Reader, then you are a Tolkien reader. As opposed to being, say, an Edgar Allen Poe reader or a John Steinbeck reader. Hence, The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien.”

He stared out at the ocean. He didn’t say anything for a while. He looked like he was contemplating a Zen koan. “Yes. That’s it,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “But, it goes way beyond that.”

A couple weeks later, Chris was at my house. We had been listening to music and talking about girls. You know, what teenage boys frequently do when they’re not looking for gray whales and pondering Zen koans. When he left to go home, it was high tide, so instead of walking along the beach as he normally would, he walked along the road, and a drunk driver in a pickup truck swerved sideways and hit him, knocking him into a telephone pole, and he died there in the street about forty yards from my house. I didn’t know about it until the next morning.

Today, I still wonder what the hell he meant when he said, “It goes way beyond that.” Way beyond what? The Tolkien Reader who reads Tolkien. I mean, come on, how deep can that really be? Simple. Obvious. Clear. Most Zen koans, vague though they may be, are usually simple in themselves. And what the heck did Chris know about Zen koans anyway?

Maybe he was just messing around with my head. He liked to do that. Maybe he was giggling inside as he saw me sitting there on the beach struggling to achieve some kind of philosophical awareness. Some kind of state of enlightenment. It’s been driving me nuts ever since. He would have loved that. On the other hand, maybe he did come up with his own Zen koan. Is it even answerable? Or is it kind of like asking, " What is truth? What is the meaning of life?”

If The Tolkien Reader had been around at the time, maybe Siddhartha might have come up with that little saying while sitting beside the river. Maybe I’m just making too much of it. I tend to do that. I’m like the proverbial fish swimming upstream, against the current, and not getting anywhere.

“It goes way beyond that,” he had said.