Middle Earth

I could be mistaken, but I believe Tolkien referred to his created literary world as Middle Earth not because it was geographically central, but because it stood midway between the ancient dimly remembered past and the unimaginable end-of-days future.

My friend Laura writes a weekly column in The Talbot Spy. She’s been at it for nearly a year now. You can read her latest, here.  Called “8 Minutes,” it’s her particular slant on the time it takes light to travel the 93 million miles from sun to earth, as well as a personalized meditation on the value of writing. Distilled down, it says we’re all living on borrowed time here in a finite world in which our sun will eventually flare out in a blaze of glory ending earthly life as we know it. Or, as she puts it so eloquently:

 

Everything has an expiration date. No matter what we do to preserve our planet’s diverse species, convert to renewable resources, and end reality television… in 4.5 billion years, our star will run out of hydrogen. At that moment, she will balloon towards the planet, dry our oceans, blow off our magnetic field, shred our atmosphere, and in a last violent expenditure of energy, carry us back into the embrace of her collapse.

 

Laura’s a much better writer than I am, so I’ll have to take her word for it. I can only add in postscript, here from our vantage in Middle Earth, this further wisdom: The dinosaurs with their pea-sized brains also maybe thought they had a couple of billion more years to stand around munching greenery, but they were, in fact, mistaken.

 

Middle Earth, the dino version.

 

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Happy Monday, y’all.