#with Pome for scale of course

[maclanahan--mermaid-comics]

Long Jelly

Pose reference from @adorkastock

[symphonyofsilence]

Here are the ages of the Finweans and Luthien in relation to each other according to the Annals of Aman:

(Of course, there are different versions of the events, and in the version of PoME Míriel dies when Fëanor is an adult so he must be much older than his siblings. But it's an early version and the dates here are the latest version. The one that we got in the Silmarillion. And IMHO, they also make the most sense cuz otherwise, Fëanor must have been fighting someone around the age of his children. And it would not be very likely for Maedhros and Fingon, and Celegorm, Curufin, and Aredhel to be so close)

the elves reach adolescence at 50 and adulthood at 100 and marry only after that. (in the NoME, it's said they mostly marry at around 200, but in the same book, it's said that Galadriel must have been around 2880 years old at the time of the flight of the Noldor. Finrfin would have been approximately 3081. meaning that Finarfin had been 201 when his last child was born, so he must have married young.) So at 21, Feanor would have been a little kid when Fingolfin was born. (Findis would have already been born. But we don't know when), and at 61, he would have been a teenager when his youngest sibling, Finarfin was born.

It's said that Feanor married early in his youth (I'm getting the vibe that all of the sons of Finwe wanted to get the hell out of that home ASAP) but we don't have an exact age. But we know that he'd be above 100. So Finarfin would be +39 years older than Feanor's firstborn. and Finarfin is the youngest of Feanor's siblings, so. all of the sons of Fëanor would be younger than all of their aunts and uncles.

Luthien was 10 years younger than Fingolfin and 30 years older than Finarfin. These are not large numbers on the elven scale. (So, Celegorm was trying to marry someone around his uncle's age, not much younger than his father. But they hardly had the most age difference when Thingol married someone who had existed forever and is older than time, and Beren, Tuor, Andreth, and Aragorn are people that existed in the ME.)

Also an interesting detail:

This rate of growth is later changed to 50:1 due to "The Maeglin problem" (and many other problems I might say. like Earendil & Elwing having children at 0.32 y/o)

But according to this earlier rate (144:1), Feanor (who died at 3142) and Fingolfin were 21 when they rebelled against the Valar & came to Middle-earth. Meaning they've only just reached MLDA in the United States. Which....explains a lot.

[castlehead]

we will thru hell.

there is a wonderfull book on the moral question of suicide by albert camus called the myth of sisyphus. great extenstential text, even tho camus has been somewhat popularized and his message muddled by generalizations due to those bodacious fadfollowers of existentialism.

his argument is that the question of whether to willfully kill yrself is essential to consider if anyone is to pursue that ultimate question, the meaning of life etc. makes sense. why stay here, on this bluegreen orb, if there is no reason? but sisyphus' predicament is parallel to ours. he is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill forever, which once he reaches the top, falls back down. drawing on kierkegaard, among others, the absurdity of mans existence is that we choose to pursue the same dull round that leads nowhere. the most important moment for sisyphus, therefore, is after the boulder rolls back down, and he turns back to start the meaningless process again. why does he not just sit down and give up the ghost, when he knows he is already condemned, past hope for being freed from this mindnumbing toil? thats the absurdity, which too draws on blaise pascals idea of one being unable to sit alone in a room. we as people would rather divert ourselves with a useless task than sit and rest in the nausea of inertia.

the idea of 'turning back' or, to clarify, a kind of hesitation, as well is a trope throughout philo and literature of the past, including kierkegaards book Fear and Trembling, a study of abraham called on by god to murder his son isaac; he is a knight of faith, so to speak, bc he follows gods dictum over his own wellness, and does not hesitate; kierkegaard is a soul of infinite resignation, bc he introspects, and complicates an issue he feels he has no ultimate control ovr. i am reminded of a quote by rimbaud: "you turn your head; new love! you turn your head again; new love!" one makes the choice at the right time or wrong one, but then again, the universe is so vastly mutable that yr fate will always depend on an infinite variety of things.

there is, therefore, no right time, nd there is no fate, unless thee make it so..

that mankind feels herself doomed when there is no obvious determinism as to the governance of life, is absurd, and causes us to folly, engage in awkward acts, feel thwarted, heistate.

but a reason for what happens to us must be rooted thru, usually via past experiences. we are slaves to time and its forward motion so then human reason too slavishly follows the forward course, the abcd that large scale is no compass for things, nor for where is the 'telos of the seed'y as i myself like to say, nor for why things are, or why mankind at times corrupts herself and herself -goes to- seed, like a forsaken garden of attitudes, creeds, faiths, decisions, that all add up to the same chains of us to these troubled biases of linearity.

kierkegaard, mentioned before as a philosopher drawn upon in this work by camus, is so important bc he rejected the idea of causation and delved headfirst into confusion and abstruseness and complexity. complexity is our only way out bc we will not fully know what all of what ends discovered thru its means; give mortals the ability to determine the truth, and they will limit the very universe. ergo nietzsches famous ellipsis, 'lest we perish from the truth.' again, the absurdity, like the absurdity of writing a pome, is that we are after the truth, but do not desire its ultimate expression. the problem of modern poetry is the same in miniature: a pome is writing the ego out, is done to attain clarity as to who one is, or at least who they might be. yet in modern confessional poetry the ego, altho th tru daemon and stoker for gr8 works, is the thing that must be exorcised, the problem dealt with, the pain to be relieved. the crisislyric, whereby one saves themselvs for poetry and thus life, the meanng given to our memories we expand thru figurative language and meditations on it- are things we write of to escape 'acedia' or simply put, the emptiness of existence etc., even tho that phrase is groaningly heady as fuck. fight the egos endless pathways thru focusing on the subjeciv expression of one, or rather one possibl one. fire with fire, subjectivity with subjectivity. -

the fallacy 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' or 'after this so because of this' applies here. we exist on a plane of linear time that only apparently connects the dots, and perhaps that is the absurdity: not divine enough a force to individually shape a future utterly certain, not enough a stone to be completely without the will to shape our fortunes halfway. so then yea, sisyphus is given a choice, but is denied the choice to be free. life is not a matter of this or that, black, white; it is a matter dependent on degree, spectrum, shades. but after all, this meddling fleetingness, if we sit alone in a room and let it get to us, is a torture and a doom the same etc. etc.

and all that fun stuff.