73 |
Sojourning |
For Marta. |
Aragorn likes to jest that every journey ends in disappointment. The world does not repay imagination, forever violates its vision. For vision cannot imagine, say, the heat of Harad, nor the winter squalor of Bree, the muddy way up to Edoras. It loves to eclipse the existence of sunburn and blisters. Yet visions splintered on such pains grow light with time and lift the heaviness from facts. There’s something edifying in cold’s bitterness or the awful emptiness of Rohan’s plains—they are real, they have touched and changed him, made vision a little clearer: journey’s end is but the beginning… |