While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they’d have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.
Art can’t forcibly induce a change in behaviour. It’s not a re-education pill. Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read War and Peace. It’s work, for which art can, however, provide us with radiant materials. Art can’t win an election or bring down a president. It can’t stop the climate crisis, cure a virus or raise the dead. What it can do is serve as an antidote to times of chaos. It can be a route to clarity, and it can be a force of resistance and repair, providing new registers, new languages in which to think.
i love translators’ notes. i love seeing a little footnote that’s like “compare my good and grass-touching translation to the STUPID translations of smith and johnson, who rendered the passage ‘xyz’ because their heads are so far up their ass they’re giving ouroboroses body dysmorphia” or “this sentence isn’t translated very well, but that’s because the author wasn’t making any FUCKING sense”
First you procrastinate on the task because it is not a big enough deal to get done urgently. Then you procrastinate on the task because it has become such a big deal that doing it is overwhelming. You would think that this implies a middle point where it is just big enough of a deal to get done easily, however the inherent perversity of the universe’s causal geometry prevents this
