‘You do not know your danger, Théoden,’ interrupted Gandalf. ‘These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience. Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.’
It adds to my pleasure in this passage that the enjoyment of tobacco is one of the many things regarded with puritanical horror by my people. It might shorten your life. Horrors! (As though a short life was worth less than a long. Lung cancer is a hard way to exit, I acknowledge: but many of the exits are hard.)
I don't, as it happens, smoke: I share the hatred of the corporate deceit about the health risks of smoking, and I prefer you to smoke out of doors and away from the cradles of my grandchildren. But so long as you have the facts fairly in front of you, I don't have the slightest desire to stop you -- let alone to prevent you from speaking about it because we're sitting on the edge of ruin. Where else have we ever sat?
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And the bell, ringing. "What I do is me: for that I came."
Life, in its essence, is a making new: a wholly superfluous, superabundant, self-overflowing -- an exuberant, self-delighting process of differentiation into ever more astonishing forms, an unending dance, in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves caught up -- not just, as the left hemisphere cannot help but see it, a series of survival problems to conquer. If reality is ultimately just an eternal, unchanging, perfect unity, as some philosophies seem to suggest, life is going the wrong way about making that clear. To the degree that we can discern any governing principle to the cosmos, it is not going to be parsimony.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, p 853
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