The following letter is adapted from remarks delivered at the MICDS Parents Association Fall Coffee in Olson Hall this morning and at the Upper School assembly this afternoon.
I make no secret of my opinion that reading is the bee’s knees, and I am exceedingly proud of our intentional and increasing investments at MICDS in literacy acquisition in our youngest learners; our longstanding cultivation of a love of language and literature in our JK-12 humanities programs; and our insistence on reading as a prerequisite to critical inquiry across all academic disciplines. “Learn to read, read to learn,” or so goes a familiar expression in education, but “love to read, love to learn” is the higher aim to which we aspire.
A seminal text in the “love to read, love to learn” trajectory of my own childhood was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which, as many (most? all?) of you know, tells the story of Frodo Baggins, the nephew of Bilbo Baggins and reluctant heir to his malevolent Ring of Power—the “One Ring to rule them all”—that found its way to Bilbo in Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit. It is Frodo’s fate to carry the Ring thousands of miles to Mount Doom, the volcano where it was made and where it must be unmade lest the Ring’s creator, Sauron, destroy the world.
Furthering Frodo’s burden is the Ring’s persistent effort to bend him to its will, to addict him to its beauty and power and thereby preserve itself from destruction and ensure its restoration to Sauron. Frodo witnesses firsthand how the Ring has consumed and devastated a creature called Gollum, and he hopes to avoid the same fate—yet as the trek to Mount Doom progresses, the strength of Frodo’s resistance wanes, and his likeness to Gollum grows.
Gollum’s opposite, at least as far as the Ring’s seductiveness is concerned, is a character named Tom Bombadil, who appears early in the novel and not at all in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed film adaptation. Frodo and his three hobbit companions have barely left home before falling into the clutches of Old Man Willow in an enchanted forest near their beloved Shire. A curious individual “singing nonsense” (“a man, or so it seemed”) hears their cries for help and saves them. “I know the tune for him,” Tom declares. “Old grey Willow-man! I’ll sing his roots off.” He sings indeed (“Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!”), the tree relents, and Tom invites the hobbits to his home, where they and we learn that he is not merely old but “eldest” in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. “Tom was here before the river and the trees,” he says. “Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People” (hobbits are small) “before the seas were bent.”
Eventually hearing Frodo’s own story, Tom takes an interest in the journey his guests have begun. “‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said… and Frodo, to his own astonishment, handed it at once to Tom.” Though the Ring seeks to assert itself (“it seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his hand”), it fails to have an effect. “Suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed” and then “put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight.” The hobbits are amazed that Tom doesn’t disappear like every other wearer of the Ring, and amazed again when Tom says to an “invisible” Frodo, “Take off your golden ring! Your hand’s more fair without it.”
I have thought a great deal about Frodo, Gollum, and Tom Bombadil over the summer and through this opening fortnight of the new school year as we have reconsidered our expectations of cell phone and social media use at MICDS. I have recalled how much I loved Tom Bombadil as a kid—maybe even as much as I love Don Quixote today—as an “escape artist” in a fallen world. The analogy I would suggest is that Frodo is each of us, the Ring is our cell phone, Gollum is who we risk becoming, and Tom is who we should strive to become instead.
Tom does take an interest in the Ring, of course—he even wears it for a time—so when I propose that we should try to be like him in relation to our phones, I only mean to say that we and not our devices should be in control. We must not let them make us disappear.
Last week’s letter was about wonder. This one is too, I suppose. Tom is an immortal wondering soul whose songs manifest his delight at “the weather-wind” and “the feathered starling,” the hills “shining in the sunlight,” and the “window-panes” that “twinkle yellow” at dusk. “Hop along, my hearties!” he sings to Frodo and friends. “Now let the fun begin! Let us sing together!”
The Swiss writer Max Frisch once defined technology as “the knack of arranging the world so that we need not experience it.” We would do well to challenge ourselves to prove him wrong on every occasion when the costs of arranging the world exceed—especially for the children and adolescents in our care—the benefits that presence, engagement, and experience confer on a life fulfillingly lived. “The most profound technologies disappear,” observed the pioneering computer scientist Marc Weiser. Better them than us.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your families for a happy Labor Day weekend.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist is feelslikeimfallinginlove by Coldplay. (Apple Music / Spotify)