J. R. R. Tolkien was a man who believed in story. I came to this conclusion after this last time through Lord of the Rings. Like my keycard finally turned on the green light. Middle Earth seems so real, because it is. It's real in his head, and now it's real in all of ours, because his realness was so potent. Any fiction book that haunts you, with its characters that talk to you and landscapes that look like somewhere you've seen, it's real to the author first. I can hardly believe the amount of information he realized before he wrote the book. Footnotes, appendixes, the Silmarillion...it's more realistic than out world is sometimes. For every question, he has an answer, and I can hardly argue with him. It's lovely. I'll be spending some of my Heaven time begging him to tell me more. If I can put a little of that into these stories in my head...that's all I wish for. That and the whimsicality of Ray Bradbury, God rest his soul.