# Solemn Courage

Every so often it slips. It seems I am writing a book, but I can’t remember why. Somehow, the sentences are supposed to perform that impossible, intimate task: to translate my inner world into another. Yet they sit there so quiescent and small. How could an arrangement of words *do* anything, let alone reduce that ultimate threat to which it is all supposedly connected: the looming god machines? I look again at the monitor in which the words are contained and suddenly what once felt so raw and powerful deflates into limpness. Why would anyone listen to me, anyway? Have I said anything new? Or is *too* weird—the strangeness in my head failing to find handholds in other minds? And it floods, these pieces of doubt. Each one flitting by almost unnoticeably, but in the background they build. 

Then sometimes the flood abates as quickly as it came. The world is made of scary stuff: we really may all die, and I really might not be capable of reducing or even much affecting that terrifying threat. Yet somehow this has little to do with the words on the page. The outcomes matter—they do—but that isn’t where the motivation comes from. It’s from an ultimately simpler place: there is a problem I see, and I am going to try to fix it. The way forward is as unclear as the way forward always will be, for there is no marked path in a world as strange and scary as this. No one to tell me that what I’m doing will surely help, no one to verify that I am the one for the task, no one to assure me that everything will be okay. But somehow all of this quiets in the presence of what’s at stake. Somehow it’s obvious I am going to try, no matter the uncertainty or fear, because that is all there is.

* * *

Each time I watch *The Fellowship of the Ring* something about Frodo’s courage grows in me. It’s a wiser kind of courage than is usual for stories as grand as this—a quieter, more powerful sort. It’s a reckoning with metaphysical heartbreak. For Frodo’s journey begins by being suddenly thrust into a deeply unwelcome world: the realization that the Shire could perish; that all he loves is threatened by some vast and elusive evil that until then he had no idea existed. You can see him start to learn this; see the recognition silently take hold. It begins to dawn on him when he is first hunted by the Nazgûl, billowing in their blackness and death; takes on a deeper gravity when he sees Bilbo, otherwise so constitutionally cheerful, possessed by some demon of greed; deeper still when he sees the Ring’s power bending the minds of men into vessels of evil; and when he realizes with painful clarity that it must be him to destroy it. 

The world as he knew it is somehow, inexplicably: gone. No longer populated with the cheerful hum of the Shire—the safe, warm, familiar home where problems never amounted to more than stolen cabbages—but a terrifying, lonely place. A world without marked paths, with no one to show him the way, no sense that his mission will succeed, no sense even that it is survivable, no hope that he may remain untouched by the Ring, no guarantee that the Shire will be spared from the evils of Mordor. The quest he’s on isn’t anything like the faraway grand adventures Bilbo described. For the danger is great and the consequences are felt: should he fail, the Shire, and everything he knows and loves, will too. And what a thing for a Hobbit to learn! 

> Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”
> 
> Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

It would have been so easy for Frodo to decide not to destroy the Ring. For there is always ample opportunity to convince oneself out of unwanted updates and the responsibility they imply. At the Council of Elrond—where Elves, Dwarves, and Men from all the realms of Middle Earth gathered to figure out what do about the Ring—Frodo could have waited silently for someone else to take on that burden, choosing to believe what was easy: that the best chance of saving the Shire was in leaving the task to these far more experienced hands. He could have cowed to the forces of rationalization preying on his weakness; letting Boromir convince him that he should be given that power. He could have given up, surrendered to Sauron, or otherwise ceded that responsibility. But he didn’t. Not when he was distorted by evil, not when he nearly died, not when all hope seemed lost. Frodo and Sam just continued on. 

And it stays with me, this clarity: uncorruptible, unflinching. There is reality, laid bare in its terror and wonder alike, and they see it all without hesitation. Their actions naturally flowing through from some intimate, enduring connection to what ultimately matters. And it stirs within me that simpleness: there is a chance to save the Shire, and so Frodo and Sam will take it. Of course they will! This isn’t the quest they wanted, but it is the one they will nevertheless undertake. Since this is the world they have been given. They don’t flinch or deny it, they don’t surrender or bow, for their courage is sounder than that. It’s a solemn acceptance of the stakes as they are. A reckoning with heartbreak—the fate of the Shire wound so insecurely around so unlikely a pair of heroes, and their resolution to try protecting it anyway. 

There is a moment when Frodo and Sam break off from the rest of the Fellowship, determined to approach Mordor on their own. And they stand there looking across the jagged black rock, an entire landscape heavy with smoke from some ungodly tower of fire, so wickedly productive in the dissemination of orcs, and it seems around the last place one would ever expect a Hobbit to be. So far from home, unimaginably far. Yet they look out at it unflinchingly—the distance and hardship they must traverse—with solemn acceptance. They are going to take the Ring to Mordor no matter the cost, no matter the chance of success, no matter any of it, for it simply must be attempted. And it fills me with some kind of faith, seeing them stand there with that quiet determination. Something almost numinous. Since there is real power, silent but palpable: the courage to try. 

* * *

Perhaps I resonate so much with the Hobbits because I have also been stripped from the Shire. For I have suffered metaphysical heartbreak, too—those moments of silent betrayal, when the world I thought I had known is lost. As if suddenly and irrevocably, something promised is ripped unceremoniously away. I first felt this betrayal as a child when I realized that everyone I loved would someday die, and this basin of basic security—the sort implicitly relayed from parents to children—was shown to be deeply mistaken. I felt it again as a teenager when I first really grokked the implications of physics: the way I could be reduced, as everything could, to atom and void. And again when truly grappling with the stakes of AI: this idea, palpable sometimes, that all I love may vanish counterintuitively soon. 

The vastness of what’s at stake can be too much to hold. My death was already so painfully dark; the death of my loved ones an abyssopelagic nightmare to wear. Yet now I am thrust into an incomprehensibly colder reality still, one which threatens to collapse the human vision into void. As if everything within the familiar, the warm, and the wonderful is soon to be consumed by some desperate alien blackness, unfurling out from the great open maw of technocapitalism itself. The universe has never cared about me, for the universe does not care. But here we have it, our chance to wield intelligence to our ends; a chance to finally reverse the cruelty of death, disease, and suffering so indifferently wrought upon us. And we may well just pass it, we may well give it all away. God!

I don’t write for any particular ultimate success, my words are not backchained by way of some certain scheme. I write simply because there is a problem I see, and I am going to try to fix it. Because the wonder and the beauty and the love are all there, hanging so precariously on so tentative a thing—strange new tools to control strange new gods—and they deserve real attempts to protect them. Whether I miserably fail or outrageously succeed, somehow that isn’t the reason to do it. For there’s a courage there, something that wells within me: to try in the face of grave stakes and uncertain times. It isn’t grand, and it isn’t fun. It’s terrifying. A real responsibility, to take the vastness into oneself and accept that burden. A hard, vulnerable, and scary thing to face it, for the task is far too big and I am far too small. But it is important, and so I try. 

* * *

I wish more of the world carried the spirit of Frodo Baggins. Wish we could move through metaphysical heartbreak like him. With the solemn courage to look at an unwelcome reality—*our* reality, full of its own death, powerlessness, void—and to try. Not to lose hope, give up, or surrender; not to flinch, deny, or assume. But to take on the gravity of the situation as it is, and respond with the integrity it deserves. Like Frodo, I wish none of this had happened. I wish I had woken up into a warmer, safer world—one which promised to sustain me and everything I care about. But I am not in that world, and all there is to do is try. To try doing all I can with the time I am given.