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"The World Has Changed...I Can Smell It in the Trees, I Can Feel It in the Air...Some Things That Were ARE No Longer, Some Things ARE That Once Were Not...Some Things That Should Not Have Been, Have Been Forgotten. History Has Become Myth, Myth Has Become Legend": So Spake 'the Lady Galadriel' at the Outset of the 2002 Cinematic Interpretation of the First Book in 'The Lord of the Rings' Trilogy, 'The Fellowship of the Ring'...

And so, in this complex, multifaceted and multidimensional tale set in the backwash of and partly inspired by J R R Tolkien's (and close friends') experiences in the trenches of World War 1, we hear an echo of the 'new world' we're all waking up into today, where we are told we'll need to adjust to 'the new normal', whatever that means and will ultimately be... Curiously and coincidentally enough, a brave new world  so to speak itself bearing remarkable resonances with if not actual echoes of the new world Tolkien himself experienced in the not so long ago, and one - like his - affected irrevocably by events surrounding that selfsame epic war... Though truth be told, the actual death rate now being racked up across our globe from covid-19 is *nothing like that of the post-WW1 'Spanish Flu', which sent many tens of millions to a premature grave... After (really Afore)Thought: Yet when first hearing the above words (from the first of the Lor...
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Yet However Cliche-Ridden and Trite and Commonplace the Saying Most Assuredly Is, Hope Doth Indeed Spring Eternal...

Sam[wise Gamgee] struggled with his own weariness...Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises...Far above the Ephel Duath...the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
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"I wish I'd NEVER been born, Gandalf, I wish the [one] ring [of Sauron] had NEVER come to me, I wish NONE OF THIS had ever happened!" "NONE who live to see such days wish for that, Frodo, but THAT is not for you or any of us to determine. It is only for us to choose how to make the most of the time appointed to us."

Or as the late, great comedian Robin Williams might have expressed things: " Carpe Diem! [Seize the day]. Make the most of the time allotted you, for as the wisest man who ever lived, Israel's King Solomon, expressed it, at the conclusion of a long and eventually fraught reign, " Give a serving to seven, even to eight, for you do not know what evil will be upon the earth." ( Ecclesiastes 11:1-2.) Whereas the prophet Jeremiah, in gentle admonishment of weary and worn worshippers of the One True God - Jehovah [Yahweh] - put matters thusly: "If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is (indeed) small."
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