I remember being in fourth grade, reading the Hobbit. One day as I was nearing the end of the book, I asked my mother whether she had read it too. “No,” she laughed, “we adults have no time for these kinds of tales.” 

This made me a bit sad, so I wondered to myself, “Why is the world of adults so boring?”

Now I am an adult, a new one, rereading the Lord of the Rings. And after all this time, I find myself wondering the same thing: Why is the world of adults so boring?

I don’t think I am alone in feeling that something wonderful is missing from the modern world. Deep within my being, I’ve carried a longing for something I don’t understand, a dream of an eternal Ideal, a world beyond this one. I tend to see the world how it “ought to be” rather than how it simply “is”. When I was young I immersed myself in the world of heroes, where Achilles leads the Myrmidons to victory, Saint George slays the dragon, and Jason ventures after the Golden Fleece. I was too young to be able to critically analyze those stories then, but I didn’t need to. I felt them viscerally, without explanation or words. They fixed themselves to my imagination, and to me, they were realer than the real world. 

Today, as I look at the world around me, it’s so far removed from the world of my heroes. This is the sense of bittersweetness that comes with growing up, that I can’t escape this persistent feeling that a sense of the Ideal is missing in the shallow, disenchanted world of adults. I notice so many of us today aimlessly drifting from moment to moment, person to person, screen to screen, outrage to outrage, transaction to transaction, on and on again, trapped in a processed, cyclical reality that never satisfies the soul, one that always moves, but never goes anywhere.

But what can I do? At the sight of this I could fall into a pessimism, and be in a constant unhappiness about the state of things, wishing for a past age when things were nobler. Many young romantics become jaded adults. The higher your ideals and sense of beauty, the more violently you can be crushed under the weight of the age. 

But is this what my younger self longed for? To become so overcome with disenchantment and fatigued with world-weariness that my heart can no longer be stirred by anything? To look in the mirror and see staring right back the cynical adult that I dreaded? I could never be satisfied this way. 

I think that if there is anything in me that is worth preserving, it is the child in me who believed in heroes and intuited that there is a higher world, one beyond this one. Since my youth I have been trapped between these two worlds, a tension that can only be resolved by a struggle carried to the very end. To fight a long defeat, a kind like that of a man who knows he will lose and continues to fight anyway. 

Since I was young, I’ve been thought of as someone who lives a bit in the clouds. Often my teachers would complain to my parents that I wasn’t paying them the due attention, not following instructions, playing with something, off somewhere else. I certainly remember the frustrated notes they would write in the margins of my agenda. For a long time I thought that maybe it is better to live this way. But I really don’t think that is true anymore. Even if we don’t understand why, we were born for the present moment. We were made to see the world as it is and still refuse to submit to it. 

Maybe this is what Tolkien meant by the “long defeat”, that in the face of a fallen world, we fight on, even as the world passes away. To fight the long defeat is to hold fast to the Ideal even if the world calls it useless and reviles you, that even if you had the whole world to lose, you gave it up and pursued something higher to the point of defeat. Maybe this is a meaning of life, that it is a slow, losing battle, and still, it is one worth fighting. 

In just a few days I’ll be graduating. Next semester I’ll begin at Iowa State. Aside from that, I don’t know what lies ahead. But at the very least, I do know this. The defeat is long, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we fight it, even to our final moment. I owe it to my younger self.

“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

An even greater victory is coming. But until that day comes, we must fight the long defeat.