The Gandalf Option

"I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."

With the new LOTR movie announced, I’m thinking about some of my favorite moments from the original trilogy. One scene between Frodo and Gandalf (in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring) strikes me as especially pertinent.

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.

---

I recently reviewed two books. One review is Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution, an essay collection that surveys, and often satirizes, the sacred spaces of the Left. The other is Auron MacIntyre’s The Total State, a grim, slightly hysterical account of the deep state’s machinations and the futility of American liberalism.

I didn’t love either, but it was interesting to see two authors come at similar problems from different angles. Bowles and MacIntyre both see America’s cultural decay and idiocy. Bowles offers satire and MacIntyre offers a radical postliberal vision. MacIntyre is too serious; Bowles isn’t serious enough.

It’s tempting to fixate on giant problems far beyond our control. But here again, there’s a Gandalf line¹ that I often need to hear myself:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Funnily enough, doing what you can is actually better than just complaining about what you can’t change.

Or to put it another way:

1. Credit for the idea of The Gandalf Option to Alan Jacobs.