Andromeda24601 - Have You Ever Confused A Dream With Life?

“You attend the funeral. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.”

— Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections

Can we talk about the scene in Fellowship of the Ring where Arwen first appears for a second?

Aragorn goes from “oh shit” to “really, Arwen?” in like three seconds. Like he’s scared one moment, and then he’s just fondly annoyed.

I appreciate this scene for so many reasons.

“…I am half afraid to hope for what I long for.”

— Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mrs. A.P Strong, August 1851

“I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it. And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am—the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first. It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.”

— Neil Gaiman, “Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech”