Saturday, March 28, 2015

"Treebeard" - Jacob's Thoughts

So I don't know if this is a popular opinion or not, but I actually really like the Ents.  Yes, "Treebeard" was kind of an overlong and slow-moving chapter; but given the slow-moving nature of the Ents, that pace felt thematically appropriate to me.

Part of my affection for these creatures lies in residual remembrances of my Ecocriticism seminar that colored so many of my posts a year ago; the Ents seem an apt symbol for a Nature that pushes back against us polluting, exploitative, and destructive human beings that blithely and selfishly abuse the Earth's resources like Saruman.  And like the Ents, Mother Nature, which normally takes ages to change and move and adapt, has suddenly awoken in a rage and now swiftly attacks us with mega-droughts across California and Australia, melting ice caps, and super-storms that ravage the Gulf and East Coast (and that's likely just for starters). 

But these Ents aren't just metaphors--they are also characters, I've realized this time around.  I'd plum forgotten about the Entwives, and the forlorn melancholy of Treebeard as he sings a song of lost love that is apparently older than all recorded human history.  That is a long friggin' time to still be carrying the torch for a lost lover--and I'm one to talk!  Yet even sadder is that this story isn't unique to Treebeard--all the Ents have been without their lovers for ages!  In fact, their entire species seems endangered because of it.  What is the commentary going on here?  Is this a warning against taking women for granted?  (If so, that's some rich irony from a text that features so precious few female characters!)  Or, less-grandiosely, is this just another symbol for how losing a lover can feel apocalyptic and like it lasts for centuries?  There is some rich and elusive symbolism with the Ents here.

I'll tell you what I most enjoy about the Ents, though: through them, Tolkien actually engages with the ramifications of immortality in a way that he doesn't with, say, the Elves.  Now, the Ents are not immortal, of course; but they have apparently existed for so staggeringly long, that from a human perspective they might as well be.  As such, Treebeard can say things like "Let's not be hasty" repeatedly, because the truth is, compared to these hobbits who exist only in a blink of an eye by Ent standards, that Treebeard really does have all the time in the world by which to make decisions.  Hence he and the Ents move so slowly, so carefully, so deliberately, and so often not at all--for if you have literally millennia to move, then why hurry?  It's why they can speak so long and slowly and digressionally, as well as carry the torch for lost wives for so long--it's not like their lives are too short for that sort of thing.

It is we human beings who must rush about, as we constantly feel the dread march of time breathing down our necks with ever increasing rapidity.  A physicist friend of mine, upon turning 30, decided to calculate how much time he had experienced--when you're 3, for example, a year feels like a third of your life, cause it is; and when you're 4 a fourth, then a fifth, and so forth.  By his calculations, by the time most of us reach 25, even if we still later live to be 90, we have nevertheless already experienced around 80% of our lives.  For by the time you are decades old, what's another year but another fraction of your life flying by?

But that arithmetic gets jacked up when we start talking about life-spans in the millenia, not mere decades.  When a year is a mere 10,000th of your life, then mourning a lost lover for centuries suddenly doesn't seem like such a big, long, waste of time; and conversations that take tedious hours to finish, by Ent perspective are really only seconds long; and Ents that slowly turn into trees for ages then back into Ents again, will really have only appeared to "sleep" indeed; and of course, one will have long learned to never be hasty.

These behavioral ticks of the Ents intrigue me in part because it indicates that Tolkien really has given some thought as to the implications of super-longevity--what that would look like, how that would effect behavior, etc.  Because Tolkien has apparently not given the same thought to the Elves' purported immortality.  We only know Tolkien's elves are immortal because he told us; nothing about their behaviors gives that longevity away, as we mostly just find more idealized forms of humans--they may be more nimble and skilled and beautiful and serene than us regular humans, but other than that, their immortality has not caused their civilization or society to behave all that differently than ours.

Yet the Elves have lived even longer than the Ents, and will outlast them, too.  So why is it that the Ents have evolved behaviors more commensurate to their massive lifespans, while the Elves still live day to day in human time?  Maybe that's a small quibble, but it is one that the Ents can't help but foreground for me.

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