Gandalf the White's Reply

By Kyra Jucovy

You, girl, with your eyes on the stars and your head in the clouds, Girl,
with your feet on the ground and your heart in your hands,
Come and walk with me a while,
Down a million winding pathways,
Under hot sun and cool night skies,
With the moon shining upon us.
Let us smell the fresh-cut meadows,
Climb the snowy peaks of mountains.
Let us tarry in the forests,
Far from other people's sorrows.
Oh, my lady, let us wander,
Through the great constructed city
And the distant rustic village.
We can smoke a bit together,
Drink a few pints of good ale.
What is it for, then, you ask?
Why are we wandering amidst death?
Why feel so drawn to rot and mold,
When there.s no way to destroy it?
Why honor that which ruins itself?
I honor ruin itself, you say.
I don't know, so I can't answer.
It's not as though I am omniscient.
This world surrounds me, of course,
And sometimes, caught in quicksand,
I almost forget everything else,
Because, as I have told you
(Or was it you who told me?
I find it hard to remember.)
There are lakes here.
And, as you told me,
There's art and inspired literature!
Now, you or I could call death to life
Or stretch and mold a world to our desires,
But what are we,
Compared to those who live and love
In caves, without a hint of light,
Except that reflecting from themselves?
Since we do nothing, now,
Or only that which must be done,
And our pale stabs at anything else
Fail to drown us forever in stagnant waters,
In that case, what are we
With our kindness and compassion?
What can love of man avail,
Lofty ideals, smaller principles?
You ask why good intentions pave
The road to death, pain, and woe.
All that I can tell you,
In my infinite ignorance,
Twice as great as yours,
Is that the lofty miss the details,
High ideals can be corrupted,
Perfect love fails perfectly in an imperfect world,
And yet imperfection
Is inextricable from the cycle,
And I wonder at those shadows,
Grasping so hard to each other,
Knowing no light but reflections.
Hope, deluded, is still stronger.
For you, constrained within your knowledge
That at almost any moment
You can lift your head and breathe again,
Are more lovely than the breathless
But less awesome than the breathless,
Who, freed by their limitations,
Knowing only that they are doomed
Are unable to love everything -
Love some things all the more!
So, like you, I pass away now,
Leaving all this world behind me
(Except that part of me ensnared here
For as long as matter lives on.).
Yet, it's a kind of resignation
To bid farewell to rustic village,
Glorious mountain peak and forest,
All the objects of our love
(That art! That literature! That sense of self-sacrificing passion that
can annihilate a man and yet somehow elevates her above even the
highest-level beings, in that she does what she does predicated on faith
and hope alone in a sense we who have wisdom can never, ever know).
Staring at the shore from my boat,
Staring at the stars in that sky,
I give you one final answer,
Here, at what amounts, for me, to the end of time,
For, unlike you, guided,
I cannot just stick my head back in at will,
Sighing, for no more will I drink or smoke, eat or walk:
Perhaps to love all things is like to love nothing at all.