Truths to Write

I have a piece of paper, and at the top of it I have written a paraphrase of C. S. Lewis:

Do not worry about being original...
tell the truth, and you will find that you will be original as a byproduct.

Below this I have listed a list of things I consider "truths" about which I would like to write:

• No good has ever come without sacrifice. This is not sacrifice in the sense of payment or investment. This is sacrifice for someone else, without the expectation of return.


• Sometimes people do not need help, but to be asked for help.


• Look to your needs only as part of the means to the end of helping others. This may, of course, be a very important part of those means, because you are human.


• There is beauty is simplicity.


• There is also beauty in complexity. This truth, and not the previous one, explains beauty in the world.


• You must be observant.


• Just because someone doesn't do what they should do does not free you from your obligations to them. It only makes those obligations harder.


• The world may look ugly and bleak. This is either because it is or because you have been taught to think it is. In the first case, imagination and false hope are paramount to ethical behaviour and survival; in the second case, imagination and hope are necessary to uncover the true beauty of the world.

We'll see how that goes! It may not, or it may. We shall see.

And some marginalia I wrote about, The Fellowship of the Ring, which I was watching while compiling the list of truths:

• There is nowhere I'd rather be than the Shire.
• 0:10:24 or so when the little hobbit girl runs up yelling, "Gandalf! Gandalf!" is maybe my favourite moment n the whole movie. [up until 0:10:55, Gandalf's smile]
• "I think in his heart Frodo's still in love with the Shire."
• "He is summoning all evil to him. Soon he will have an army large enough to [conquer?] Middle-earth."
• "Where are you taking us?" "Into the wild."
• Write a landscape you can see.
• When Frodo is in Rivendell, feeling homesick, we know that he's hardly begun. This is the sad part. "I am ready to go home." By the end of the trilogy, that dream will lost forever.