Truth in Tragedy

Rating: Teen, for kind of mature themes/raw emotions

A/N: no shade to people who like and find meaning in the kinds of literature that I’m sort of knocking in this piece? This is not supposed to be everyone’s point of view, I’m just processing. This piece is very personal, and kind of heavy.

Do I find you in Denethor, Father? At the end of his life, he looked in a flickering thing and his soul was drawn away, leaving behind madness and despair. You, too—your palantir consumed you, a litany of ugly things stripped of their humanity. This is tragedy: it is not petty.

Realistic fiction, as it’s called, seems to me to take comfort in the small, the petty, the minimization of a person. I do not judge it in general, but I do judge it for me. I cannot comprehend the small, the petty, I cannot comprehend the ways in which we remove the stories from things and render them meaningless and trite.

Denethor has majesty and weight. Denethor has tragedy and sorrow, but a long life, too, that was not wholly ill-spent—Denethor was clever, and he worked with cleverness, and he kept his city safe. So too, you. He did not love his sons the way they needed to be loved, though he did try. He thought Faramir insufficient; he placed too much upon Boromir. I am your only child: I am not Faramir. I know that you love me. The weight upon me that is too heavy is the weight of Boromir, who was perfect.

Or do I find you in Eöl, Father? His was a different madness—the fear of the thrall. The man who had lost everything (as you lost what must have felt like everything) near the beginning of his life, so he spent so much of his later life trying to cage and keep it near him, to protect himself from that pain. He caged his wife (not wholly unwilling, three words that can mean so many things—I choose here to understand them here to mean that neither of you understood what you were doing, that the pact the two of you made dragged you down and spat you out, but you did not mean for it to be like that. Neither of you did.) He kept his son in a cage and then refused another’s cage for him. At the end of his life, he, too, was seized by madness and despair.

These are not little stories. They are not meaningless. They are tragedies, and they have weight and they have meaning. They are not petty, but powerful. They are not cruel, but kind. They are not terrifying, but tragic.