The great Irish writer James Joyce tried his best to distance himself from his Catholicism, but the Jesuits planted its spirit in his heart and, try as he might, he couldn’t get away from it. In each of his short stories, Joyce created a moment when his main character would come to see something about himself or the world he had not seen before. They were life-altering, eye-opening moments. And what did Joyce end up calling these instances? Why, epiphanies, of course!
“In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.” These opening words to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” have been inscribed in my mind from my earliest memories. My father used to read the book aloud, long before I could read it myself, and the ideas of hobbits and elves, dragons and dwarves, adventures and heroism, were embedded in my imagination as firmly as my own family history. As I grew older, eventually reading “The Lord of the Rings” and then watching Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations, I fell in love with the world of Middle Earth that Tolkien created in his stories. I found a comfort in Tolkien’s stories unlike anything else I’ve read since; and, as an English major and dedicated bookworm, I’ve read quite a lot.