September 30, Third Age 3019
I consider the stars and wax poetical. Again.
I did not lie when I said that I would not be writing in this book for quite a while; it has been months, and I have not touched it! This and that have kept me from it, and Pippin, of course, is very proud of me for emerging from my shell. But here I am in Rivendell, and if this is not a place for musing, then where is? I have become pensive again, here among the waterfalls and autumn leaves, as I come nearer and nearer to returning home.
So I decided to sit out under the stars to think and write. I do not think I have ever seen them look so beautiful. Maybe they feel at home here, among the People of the Stars in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. Minas Tirith, too, is beautiful, in its high, ancient, sculpted way, as are the wild, wind-swept, golden plains of Rohan; but no place is as beautiful as this, woven through as it is with the Elves' sweet singing, surrounded by the trees that I can almost hear singing themselves, and seeming to be as much a living part of the hills as those trees. It is just as beautiful at night, if not more so. I can hear the myriad songs and tales drifting from the firelit hall in a slightly discordant sort of harmony, with the roar of wind and waterfall as bass and the trill of crickets keeping time; the lights of the buildings are a mirror for Elbereth's lights in the sky.
Well, I suppose Lothlórien is as beautiful. And the Shire, to those who love her.
It's a…a sharp beauty here under the stars, for lack of a better word. Sharp and cold like sunlight sparkling through the edges of ice, and as fragile, for all that this place has lasted for three thousand years, and the stars for eons longer. This beauty still feels fragile, like an image wrought in crystal so fine that a single touch would break it, or like the crystal-thin surface of a dream. It does seem too beautiful to be anything but a dream, intricate and vividly bright, but delicate, intangible. Strange, isn't it, and sad, that I have seen the pinnacle of beauty, here, and the pittance of ugliness and desolation in Mordor, but I find that only the ugliness feels real.
While I am writing, I might as well mention this: that I am glad to have seen Bilbo, but disappointed as well that he is not quite as I remembered him; he is not so keen of mind and spirit as he was once, old age having found him at last, after he eluded it for so long. He has been interviewing Merry, Pippin, Sam, and me about our adventures, perhaps hoping to write our tales himself; and I know he is deeply interested, but he does seem to fall asleep over his notes and forget what he has already asked. (He does, however, remember that he is now one hundred and twenty nine years of age, and very near to overtaking the Old Took; he has cherished this goal fondly for years, and it has long been a point of pride that his chances of accomplishing it are so good.) I should have expected as much – the Ring is no longer prolonging his youth; of course I knew that – but I still feel sorrow. To me, it seems a bit like the fading of the power of the elven rings and their works when the One Ring was destroyed: a sacrifice that must inevitably be made to defeat a great evil, but a sacrifice no less. Rivendell, too, must fade in time, this gorgeous place where the ancient and the living and all of time seem caught together in crystal. But the stars will not fade – not until the ending of the world, when no eyes are left to gaze at them and no mind is left to wonder. And although that sounds terribly pretentious and somewhat trite, it is nonetheless rather comforting.
I wonder, after I have left, if I will ever see Bilbo again. I will miss him greatly. He is something of a reminder of the years before the Quest, the father of my tweenage years, when the stories he told of Elves and dragons were the closest to peril and adventure I would ever come. Those memories, now, are surreal, and saddening, but they too are strangely comforting.
Author's Note: I cannot believe how long it has been since the last time I updated this fic. Four months! I feel so awful! *sniff* No doubt many of the steady readers have long given up on it, but c'est la vie. Maybe some new readers will find it. The good news is that except for one more possible intervening entry that I have not written, the next several are already done. And that means that they were the insistent, substantial ideas, not just my nebulous rambling. So really, stay tuned this time! Thank you for your patience. :-)