Crossword “Hobbies”

Do the crossword and you will read the vertical word and learn Elizabeth II’s hobby.

FOCUS ON LANGUAGE English

39

April 2013

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate,

And though we pass them by today,

Tomorrow we may come this way

And take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

J.R.R. Tolkien

If you face “West of the Moon, East of the Sun” and look for the shores, whence Gandalf, Galadriel, and Frodo sailed, my Friends, then you will eventually discern hidden writings. In the waves and the clouds, through the gentle twilights one day, at dawn in the spring you wake up earlier and discover something special. Not immediately, but I hope you will see that the word hobbit holds within itself, like a seed in an apple, another word, the word “hobby”, i.e. something we love so much in the world that we are ready to share all our free time with, which, though small, is of great importance for us.

And maybe the writing of The Lord of the Rings, initially, was not more than a simple hobby for a Professor of English Philology at Oxford University. But today we know how big and glorious things can emerge from very small things, becoming gradually so through day-to-day routine, blooming, ripening... Habits, Hobbits, a process of transforming old routine things into something playful and happy, only halflings can, or those who are like them, can open the world of possibilities and necessities from one moment to another…

Collectors of stamps can spend the whole evening leaning across a table under a green table lamp with a magnifying glass in hand, observing their treasures. Collectors. What things do men collect? Echoes of things? Collectors buy landscapes with distinctively spoken echoes, as Andrey Tarkovsky wrote in his diary. Tastes, smells, remembrances

of smells? Here, I think our treasure is mostly inside, and the inclination and the nature of a person’s radiance rests on what they have been fond of for a long time, and now it may have its embodiment.

I remember how one day I myself started my collection of angels. Some years ago it began with the seemingly ordinary question – What is your hobby? – from an English friend. But I was at a great loss to answer. Although I loved many things, and did many things, I couldn’t really think what my hobby was. I asked myself, what is it really? What precious thing and activity can fill my life, pleasingly occupying my time?

“What do you love most of all?” suddenly a voice questioned me. It came from some space, where angels themselves might dwell, subtle but precious: inside of me, or from inside of out? But I had no time to have a discussion with the voice, for, at that very moment, I understood I had known what my answer could be. I ran out of the room to go somewhere to find angels, the little figures of angels, I mean. That first day there were no angels for me. But the next day, spontaneously, we, my daughter and I, found ourselves in the bookshop in Arbat Street to buy some necessary writing materials, and I saw the two angels which now sit above my piano and always listen to me - an angel boy and an angel girl. My very first ones, my dearest; I was enchanted. I felt myself as a demiurge after hard work – a Saturday bliss.

Since that day, many wonderful images of angels with lyres and playful elves have come to stay with us, but that very first impression, a sense of mirth from meeting with my future collecting focus, elves and angels, I remember still. And this elvish sense, while being within my own middleworld of a hobbitual hobby, was born surprisingly as if it were the beginning of some miracle. Maybe it is so now with my collection, because of that first paper angel I made together with my daughter in her childhood many Christmases ago. It had a delicate white cardboard cone body, with little wings glued on, and with a tiny paper trumpet in its hand. This is a treasure which we have kept all these years in a green box with all our manifold Christmas angels and toys.

Fairy beginnings, with things little noticed … and yet to be continued, though nobody knows where or how… Still, there should be nothing special in ‘waiting’ to see how the whole miracle will unfold before our eyes. But one rule of Mark Twain’s we, perhaps, have to remember is: “Kindness is the language the blind can see and the deaf can hear”.