Jonathan Goldstein
‘I am not of Hobbit stock. I don’t have that kind of heartiness’
My friend Josh phones. “I just finished listening to your radio show,” he says. “Your pauses are beautiful.”
“So your favourite thing about my show is the absence of me?”
“Absence has its importance,” he says. “When the inventor of Coca-Cola said he was going to put bubbles in, don’t you think there were haters who said no one’s going to buy the absence of soda? Turns out the bubbles are what people like best — little spheres of gaseous absence. The absence of Goldstein makes the heart grow fonder for that next sip of refreshing Goldstein.”
He is being sarcastic, of course, and I am about to retort with some choice words, when I flash back to
The Lord of the Rings. Or, rather, a conversation I had many years ago about The Lord of the Rings.
Billy was one of those guys who hung up maps of Middle-earth in his high school locker, the kind of person who could sing songs by Simon and Garfunkel in Elvish. It was a few days after having seen The Return of
the King when I ran into him in the fantasy section of a used bookstore. Billy asked me what I thought of the movie and I said I found Frodo overly emotional about carrying the ring. Sure, it tempts people with acts of evil, but so did combining Jack Daniels, insomnia and Google.
“Personally,” I said, “I don’t think it’d be such a huge deal to carry the ring.”
“You couldn’t pull it off,” Billy said with contempt. “You couldn’t even be a steward of Gondor. You wouldn’t even be one of the Rohirrim!”
I hate conflict and so my first instinct was to placate him. And so I agreed, telling Billy I was ill-equipped to hold the ring, that I was weak-willed and had little sense of community. I then said that he was probably better suited to the task of ring bearer.
“I wouldn’t touch the ring,” Billy said. “Gandalf wouldn’t touch the ring. Elrond wouldn’t touch the ring. Fools like Boromir tried to touch the ring, but they died. I cannot handle the ring. I am not of Hobbit stock. I don’t have that kind of heartiness.”
Although I wanted to say: “No, Billy, you don’t have that kind of heartiness. Your hands are as smooth as peeled tangerines and whenever you burp, you’re compelled to simultaneously speak the word, ‘Ralph.’ ” I instead held my tongue. And years later, when Billy opened a collectors store, I was rewarded with discounts.
If The Lord of the Rings teaches us anything, it’s that we all carry the ring around inside of us, and that ring is our capacity for wrongdoing. Of course we wish that this capacity could be removed from within us and pounded out into a shiny ring to be passed around from person to person, to allow us to ease the burden of our urges. Such urges, say, as wanting to voice the really mean things we really think.
“You’re right,” I say to Josh. “Silence is a great tool. And so, too, is the wielding of gas.”
To quote from LOTR, “Friendship can turn great evil to good.” Holding your tongue can, too; though thinking mean things — that is every man’s right. And at the moment, I am exercising that right to the fullest extent.