Warped, bent and disfigured and disabled, so you can no longer function.
Your behaviours, despite your best efforts and hardest reflections, constantly lead you into despair and isolation, and addiction and obsession, anger and fury, and loneliness and isolation.
And you die still in anger, in hatred, in rage, in bitterness, alone, unhappy.
So, very very lonely.
And yet the anger numbs it all.
I thought Gollum was going to be some kind of hero. I was dying for Gollum to bring it around, to make his last moment, a moment about sacrificing.
But in the end the whole story, the pivot upon which the world’s fate turned, was simply due to a momentary lack of balance and awareness. A workplace incident, which stronger health and safety measures might have prevented.
Nothing due to virtue, nothing due to sacrifice. Though I still want to believe that what appeared to the author, an unfortunate accident, was in actual fact determined and intended. A last saving grace.
But I kind of suspected the ending too. I could see it coming. Before I had even read it, I saw it coming and I wondered if the book ended like that, and it did, whether this was the inspiration and idea that had Darth Vader saving Luke Skywalker when he finished off the Emperor.
Because if the ending is not valiant, then the picture the author paints of human possibility is a supremely bleak one – of a being that lives an almost eternal life and is never able to break out of his pain and grief and trauma, enclosed, boxed off from the world, from human emotion, trust and love, and doomed to this state until passing away. Struggle, unhappiness and then death.
So many lives like this.
They’re worth mourning.