Quote:
Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc
I wondered whether it was some very suspicious cipher for marital infidelity.
|
This never occurred to me before your unpacking of it. After all, Smith, being autobiographical, is a metaphor for 'going somewhere' while not actually going there.
What did it mean for Tolkien to 'go to Faerie?' What does it mean for any of us to do so?
It is not to literally leave our family and go to a far country where we will dally with the folk of that land. Instead, it is to go where our imaginations take us, whether through a book, a painting, some other work of art, some new form of tech, or through our own fantasizing, or writing our own work of fantasy or at least story.
But how is this 'leaving one's family?' As
Formendacil said, 'we go there alone.' We can't take others with us into our own heads, into our own imaginations.
And yet, when we 'come back' from wherever we have been, our close family may ask us, 'where have you been to?' - and it is a legitimate question: where have we been in our imagination? Is it a 'place' that can be described? a state of mind that can be related?