On Not Knowing

Or, why you should always go back and reread.

2/10/2022

I’ve been busy this week—finalizing edits on a piece for Plough, pitching a few new ideas, and making good progress on the third chapter of my book on Jesus and Difference. Also, I put up a little personal website- I’m told a writer “in this economy” must have such a thing. You can find it here:

Besides Tolkien I’ve been reading this marvelous book by Daniel Vaca: It’s quite a take on the way book publishing fostered evangelical identity in mid-Century America. As with much of American religious history these days, I’m not sure if the broader social claims made in it are true. But there are some terrific stories included, and I look forward to finishing it next week.

On Not Knowing

We have gotten a bit far into this story for me to admit this.

But I can’t quite figure out why the Hobbits are in danger. It is clear that they are in danger, or that they think they are in danger. But I do not know who or what is coming for them.

The Hobbits, you see, are always panicking. Last week found them attacked by a Willow (a willow! Attacking them!) and fearing shadows they saw on the road. This week found them at the Prancing Pony afraid of yet another shadow.

So we have three small men, riding fat ponies, approaching an inn called the Prancing Pony. They are completely paranoid, nearly incapacitated, by a fear of being followed.

Their fear is not completely unwarranted; they are, in this case, being followed. But they certainly lack a sense of proportion.

As I said, I wasn’t quite clear on what the Hobbits were afraid of- and I’ll confess I feel a bit silly about this. To write publicly and weekly on Lord of The Rings, perhaps the most beloved of all stories in Western literature, is a pretty silly task. (It started because it seemed to be a bit of an unexpected thing to actually do, which I find to be a helpful motivator).

As I read and prepared to write for this week, I realized that I was not sure what the Hobbits were afraid of. This is one of the chief plot points, I am preparing to write a public newsletter on my reading, and I don’t know what is going on. Fortunately, I am somewhat familiar with this feeling. In fact I dare say I spent the majority of my twenties pretending to know things I did not in fact know.

You see, I fell victim to one of the chief heresies of my young adulthood, which was the belief that it was Good for Evangelicals to go into Higher Ed. There are at least two misnomers in this statement; first that “Evangelical” is an identifiable thing (it is not, to my mind, as I will argue in print sometime soon), and second, that “Higher Ed” is in fact evidence of “higher learning” (this is also, as I learned, patently false).

I went to graduate school because I was smart and wanted to become smarter and I became, systematically and over time, more stupid. This atrophy took a few forms:

First, I needed to pretend to have read things I hadn’t read.

Second, I needed to pretend to understand the things I had read, even when I didn’t.

Third, I needed to see the deep significance of the theoretical point the instructors were trying to make, even when I thought it was smug or stupid.

Much of graduate school is dependent on Knowing Things, but a splendid few of us actually knew anything. None of us could admit that we hadn’t read something because it would lower us in the fiercely competitive economy that we lived in. So when someone referenced Calvin, we nodded sagely. The same happened with Karl Barth, who I think only one person had actually read. I still have a habit of slowly stroking my beardless chin when I am thinking. (I do not have a beard).

One way to get around this not-knowing-anything was to know one thing. There was one guy who knew a lot about Schleiermacher. One guy who had read only Bultmann. Everyone pretended to have read Feuerbach, but as far as I could tell no one actually had read Feuerbach. If you’ve never been part of a conversation between two guys who have each read one book and are using that knowledge to argue about a third book that neither of them have read, let me tell you it is a ride. It was then I learned how to roll my eyes in my heart.

Pretending to understand what you’d read was the second atrophy I underwent. There were classrooms where it was the standard to ask for explanation of something you found confusing, but in others you’d open yourself up to scorn if you confessed ignorance. I, for instance, sat through a month of lectures on Paul Tillich without ever understanding what Tillich was talking about. In retrospect, I may have had a real insight there, for it turns out that Tillich is actually not ever talking about anything useful.

The third form of atrophy was the real sticking point for me, as I was an actually-believing-Christian in a graduate department where such things were rare. I took a lot of theory because I believed at the time it would make me smarter, but it only made me think that theory was stupid.

I once took a whole class on “the Act of Reading” where we read S/Z by Roland Barthes. I hated this book. It made me realize that post-structuralism was a mistake. But everyone in the class, even those who clearly had not read the book, thought it was terrific!! And it was impossibly boring to have to read a stupid book and have a conversation with other people who pretended to love the book but clearly had not read the book.

I had this experience a lot. There was a professor who opened classes with meditations to the female divine. There was another who had us read gobs of French feminism without allowing that some of this literature was just maybe perhaps a little idealistic of certain forms of maternal experience that did not include depression and difficult birth experiences and so many other forms of acute suffering associated with maternity. One was not allowed to utter such a critique, because clearly French feminism was the future. So I did what I had to do, which was write an essay entitled Why Feminism is Bad for Women. I quoted Sarah Palin in the opener, just for the sheer anger I knew it would provoke. (This is all true, I actually did this, it was bad form, and I still smile at the memory of it.)

And then there were the other graduate students. There were the argumentative types, who came to class locked and loaded with the reading assignment like it was artillery. There were the smug types, who arrived similarly prepared but with already-rehearsed arguments available to them even if they hadn’t done the reading (Schleiermacher guy was ready). There was the one guy who said “besmirched”, I kid you not, at least four times a class even when it seemed improbable that he could fit it in. But he did! It was impressive.

It got worse when there were large gatherings of such students and their teachers. I used to attend these, though I don’t so much anymore; I’ve listened to panels about topics like “disciplinarity” and “queering the postal service”, as if these words made any sense. It was like being in Plato’s cave but the cave had been converted into some kind of disco where the flashing lights and noise made it impossible to form any correspondence between objects and reality. I hate caves and pretend words, so I mostly avoid those kinds of conversations.

Anyway, I know how to be in a room of people pretending to be smart who don’t actually know anything. I have, it must be said, an almost uncanny ability to find the hinge point of an argument and make an incisive comment even if I haven’t comprehended, or even read, the whole thing. But the older I get, the less interested I am in doing any of this. I find instead that I like to read slowly and drill down in a particular question. I am about 150 pages into The Fellowship of the Ring and reading one or two chapters a week. I write based on that reading, revisiting earlier chapters as needed but never consulting any secondary sources. This last part is critical- writing something based on a book, on its own terms, is for me part of the fun of the project. It also allows me to say when I don’t know something, or am unsure about something, or perhaps have missed something.

All this to say, I wasn’t sure if the Hobbits are in the danger they think they are in. So I went back and reread.

When he is about to begin on his journey, Gandalf asks Bilbo if he intends to bring the ring with him. The expectation is that the ring will be left with Frodo, as Bilbo had promised; Gandalf says that Bilbo “doesn’t need it anymore”. A few things worth noting thus far about the Ring; first, it does not seem to be “owned” by anyone. It is passed on, with Gollum and Bilbo and Frodo all seeming to have a turn. (Gandalf to my knowledge has not possessed the ring but he does have knowledge of its powers). But if no one owns the Ring, everyone wants to. They give it up with great hesitation.

Second, there is an “Enemy” in the “Land of Mordor” who desires to take the ring from the Hobbits. There are other hints of danger, mostly rumors about the Dark Tower being rebuilt. Elves are seen moving West, and signs of darkness are visible: “Orcs were multiplying again in the mountains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons. And there were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all these, but they had no name” (43).[1]

The Dark Power threatens to overwhelm the Shire; I had to reread to remember why the dark power wants to do so. I went back to Chapter 1, and it seems that the dark power, Sauron the Great, has returned to the Dark Tower of Mordor (50). (The Hobbits know this both from rumors and the signs that I noted above). If the Enemy can get the Hobbit’s ring, the last of the rings, he will cover all the lands with darkness. So the “charming, absurd, helpless hobbits” are indeed in danger. I only figured this out because I bothered to reread the text. Imagine that.

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[1] One thing I haven’t lost is my need to cite everything. I’m using the 1994 Houghton-Mifflin edition.