“None of us know our real names.”

“None of us have a real name, Leonidas, just names we like and names people give us.”

“None of us are good at being real.”

“We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come to us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in The Lord of the Rings (but named in the Silmarillion), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.”

“For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself / all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind.”

“None of us come to this earth to gain our worth; we brought it with us.”