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The number called was: O67

My cards and prompts were:
Facets of Faramir: Writer
Poetic Forms: Sonnet
Scientific achievement: Pharmacy

Dwimordene and Aliana asked what would happen if Faramir saw what Denethor saw in the palantír. But he's already seen it in his dreams.

Self-Medication

Over the years he devised many tricks to distract from the fact of imminent annihilation, the dream-brought knowledge that not even the virtuous survive the end of the world.

Music helped; fast finger-exercises transmuting conscious thought into muscle-memory. Words were better; ever-increasing mastery of complex tongues and forms. Meditations on the natural world. Rainbow sunsets to persuade him of a world beyond death.

One ash day, his strategies fall in ruins. Then she walks into the garden. If you live, he thinks, artless as a schoolboy, there is still life.

Self has limits - but beyond the self is infinite.

Date: 2012-03-06 09:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] altariel.livejournal.com
Thank you, Dwim, I'm glad you liked it :-) I'll trust you on the last line being Levinisian, I have only read him through you! I was thinking of a poem by Brendan Kennelly that I love:

Connection
Brendan Kennelly

Self knows that self is not enough.
The deepest well becomes exhausted.
We could wander forever in a wood
And through the trees not see a sign of love.
Turn then where windy March blows golden hair
(A drowning man will grasp the thinnest straw)
And slowly in the ceremonious air
Observe irrational redeeming law

Connect the desert with the sun at noon
Revealing open beaks, descending wings
And bones that hint of spirits that are free.
We open in a moment, love, and then
Linked with the livingness of growing things
Express the shell and comprehend the sea.


God, what if Finduilas had survived? Would Denethor have found it in him to keep going?

Now there's a question. Were they doing too much harm to each other? Did she come into his life too late? I always feel as if Finduilas tried and tried and tried - but Denethor was just a little too far gone even before she arrived. Gosh, though, I realize as I write that do find it terribly hard to imagine her living, which tends to imply that all three of her menfolk would have been completely different if she'd lived.

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