Sauron

 

December 3, 2020

The Guggenheim people ask for writing samples. I send Washington Place, Uranium 235, The Falls of the Wyona.

I’d always had trouble justifying the apparently abstract evil of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. What could he want that could be achieved in that way, with so much manifest waste and ugliness? He seemed a merely literary trope. But, oddly, actual history helps with the understanding of this. Donald Trump– a real person if an absurd one–helped me understand the motivations of the profound narcissist. He was indifferent to creating Mordor, so long as Mordor served and adored him. Better to rule in Mordor than serve in Paradise. 

Set out in the afternoon. Stopped at a light, I watch a cyclist get off Brevard Road, stash his bike in the highway landscaping, and set up as a beggar boy at the bottleneck where 19/23 exits on to the Brevard Road bridge. He looked athletic and eager on his bike, frail and downtrodden when he got himself in place with his tiny piece of cardboard saying God knows what. It’s hard for all beggars when one is revealed as a fraud. Drove on to the Parkway, but it was closed beyond the French Broad overlook. So I lit out from there on foot, southward and upward. I had forgotten how much I love to walk the Parkway when it’s closed to traffic, a vast avenue through the wilderness, always with more visible wildlife than the deep woods. Two huge crows (at distance I thought they were, together, an enormous dog) fed on an annihilated opossum. Pelt and head lay on one side of the road, still not wholly consumed innards on the other. I climbed a good while, and when I came down I’d fulfilled my number of steps yet again. I thought the east-facing slopes especially blessed, because they would receive glory in the morning. I stood in shadowy calm under one old grove and prayed a prayer I have prayed twice in my life–that I remember–and both times in 2020– “Lord, thank you for my life.”

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