Author: LectionaryStan

themoonlily:

ohlurr:

I realize this is not new information to anyone, but what struck me so hard this time I read the Lord of the Rings was the sense of melancholy.  Like it’s painfully obvious to the reader that this world is Not As It Once Was.  All of the characters we meet reference this feeling of loss in one way or another.  

The elves are the most obvious – with their fading light and their ships sailing away.  Treebeard talks about how the woods aren’t as they once were, about the ents who are falling asleep and withering to nothing.  The dwarves lust after the glory of their forefathers, be it in mountain fortresses or caverns of mithril – now empty and echoing.  Old Tom Bombadil remembers a race of great men and women, reduced simply to trinkets in cold tombs.

And even men, the race set to inherit this new age, even they are experiencing this sense of melancholy, of losing hold of something great.  We see their great cities reduced to rubble on riverbanks, or possessed by evil.  Aragorn longs to return to his throne to restore the glory of ages past, to somehow rejuvenate that which is dying in the race of men. 

And hobbits?  At first we see them as living in the present, with no great glory of the past to tie them down.  Yet when Frodo returns to the Shire, it is…Not As It Once Was.  And I think while the other hobbits are able to shake off this feeling and return to their love of life and the present, maybe Frodo’s true burden is to inherit this sense of loss from the rest of Middle Earth.  

And what makes Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien) so extraordinary, at least to me, is how there is still so much hope in the story even with all its sadness. Hope is literally Aragorn’s childhood name, given to him at a time his House is all but finished. Hope is what drives Gandalf and leads his way when others of his order become distracted and give up their purpose. Hope appears to Sam when he and Frodo trudge towards what seems to be their end in the fires of Mount Doom. Hope is there at dawn when Rohirrim arrive at Minas Tirith and blow their horns, and they ride to defend the City of Kings, though they know what they are facing. In fact, for me some of the most brilliant moments in the story are those when hope appears in the middle of darkest despair. Tolkien writes like sadness and hope are merely the two sides of the same coin. 

One of the many things I love about the world Tolkien created is the exquisite beauty that rises from sadness; lesser stories would transform sorrow and grief into bitterness, but in Tolkien’s world, it becomes a force for pity and wisdom and love. Some of his best and wisest characters are those who have known great sorrow. Melancholy and sadness are a part of Arda Marred, but like Gandalf says: “not all tears are an evil.” 

Perhaps my favourite quote from Tolkien is Haldir’s line from the Fellowship of the Ring, when the company is nearing Lothlórien:

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

zenosanalytic:

scotchtapeofficial:

science-sexual:

sonatagreen:

jumpingjacktrash:

unbelievable-facts:

In 2010, the RIKEN institute in Japan created mutant cherry blossom trees by firing ion beams at them in a particle accelerator. The mutated trees now bloom four times a year and produce more flowers.

a wise use of science powers

ok so i’m not saying this is the most japanese thing ever, but I’m not saying it’s not

“we have a ray gun that creates mutants” anime level 8/10

“we used it to make super cherry blossoms” japan level 10/10

“so are they like firebreathing carnivorous flowers or” “no they just make more flowers, more often” aesthetic level 11/10

“well done, this is exactly what we hoped would happen when we paid a zillion dollars to build a particle accelerator” —the project backers

Particle physics is fucking magic
Some wizards took a magic box into the woods and fucked up some trees. I love this shit

“ok so should we mutate like a super army or-” “no. this sakura tree.” “but why” “hanami four times a year instead of once. imagine”

The Announcement Article, in English.

I think their primary prejudice is, Why does it have to take seven minutes to sing “I love you,” or five minutes to sing “I’m dying now”? I always say, “But that’s extremely fast.” Not in realistic terms, of course. But if you go to opera and expect realism, you’re really stupid. It’s not realism, obviously – even if we build a realistic set. Trying to express yourself about love in five minutes is fast. It can take two years to say that or to even understand that. Saying “I’m dying” in seven minutes is fast. Thinking about death occupies people from puberty through the rest of our lives. It’s the biggest existential question there is. But to express yourself about the feeling of dying, or the anxiety of dying, in seven minutes is actually pretty fast. My point is, in one evening, you go through in two and one-half hours what the rest of us spend our whole emotional lives living through. (…) It’s a workout, intense and focused – if you look for the emotional dimension and not the realistic one. Opera tries to show life as it is, not as it looks. (…) The reason it seems long is that we spend time on what’s important in life. When you look at your life, what’s going to define what it was? Not the everyday business, but the emotional highlights, disasters, or triumphs you had. That’s what we focus on in opera. and that’s because we have music.

Kasper Bech Holten (director of the Danish Royal Opera) answering the question “Do you think your average spectators have difficulty investing themselves emotionally?” in Joshua Jampol’s book Living Opera 

Jupiter Ascending” took the road less traveled, into the wish-fulfillment of prepubescent girls. Around half an hour into the film, Channing Tatum despondently regales Mila Kunis with his life story — he is the orphaned half-albino runt of a space werewolf litter forced to use anti-gravity rollerblades to fly because his bionic wings were stripped when he was dishonorably discharged from the space military — and something magical happens. Every woman who ever wrote herself into her favorite universe via fanfic, every girl who created an amnesiac elven vampire princess and role-played in a chat room, every chick who ever wanted a blaster by her side and a submissive werewolf boyfriend at her back, every one l of them whispered, “Finally. It is our time.

“Jupiter Ascending” Is The Sci-Fi Movie Women Were Waiting For

GO READ THIS

(via spacerollerblades)

Flashbacks to the day I saw this in the cinema, with a friend next to me who wore a ‘the fuck is this’ expression on his face through the entire film, while me and the girl behind me literally bonded over screaming in delight and laughter. Like she kept tapping me on the shoulder like “FUCKING HELL HE’S A SPACE WEREWOLF,” and “WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE BEES, I’M IN LOVE!”

(via captn-sara-holmes)