Tldr ramble

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is a post intended to fall soon enough down the pile and into the detritus of old lore posts. This because it touches - only touches - on all the things that cannot be said, or at least can only be said obliquely because of danger of community explosion. Thanks to Rivvy and others, a conversation about gender is going on, and my sense is that a new consensus about how to receive canon - already set out elsewhere on this site - is finally articulating itself on Lore. Gender is the frontrunner, while issues of race surely remain impossible to discuss in our forum. This is a tragedy, because in Tolkien's stories we might learn what the historical seeds of modern racism actually are; he really has much to teach us. But the issue of race in the modern world remains too explosive to broach. The last taboo is religion, and I suspect that this one is also too divisive, though here I believe that Tolkien's discussion of paganism and Christianity in 'Beowulf' point the way.

What prompted this post is my recent reading of a book by a scholar at University College London who was a friend and mentor to Tolkien, an Anglo-Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic (as was Tolkien), R.W. Chambers. Today Tolkien fans hear of Chambers because he figures in Tolkien's argument about 'Beowulf,' and Chambers is indeed the second most important 'critic' in Tolkien's famous allegory of the old poem as a tower. But in his lifetime Chambers was most celebrated for his 1935 book on Thomas More, the last Catholic chancelor of England and a matyr. Having condemned heretics himself, More took his stand on his faith and met his end under the axe on the command of his king, Henry VIII.

This book on More marks a high point in English Catholic writing, a moment when the Catholic point of view could be articulated from a Professor at an English University - half a century earlier Catholics could not take a degree at either Oxford or Cambridge. This new atmosphere of toleration was transient - with civil war breaking out in Spain in 1936 the Catholic Church was what Franco defended and so became among the Left a symbol associated with Fascism (news from Mussolini and the Vatican did not help).

At the end of his book Chambers looks back on the tradition of English historical writing on More, which is of course all Protestant. He draws out the system of aristocratic patronage by which the great historical writing of the 18th century was funded, and draws out too how the stately homes of these Liberal Protestant aristocrats were built on the wealth of the confiscated monasteries. In a nutshell, Chambers take the celebrated 'Whig history of England' and reveals it to be built on a crime - a crime that all those Protestant voices of old England were complicit in, the descendants of the men who witnessed the execution of the last Catholic chancellor.

Today when I read reports from the wider world of Tolkien fandom I get this sense of a progressive alphabet mafia facing down the Catholic altright. I draw a caractature, but point at what seems a real opposition between 'Catholic Tolkien' and let us say 'Queer Tolkien.' But when we place Tolkien in the context of English history, and a tradition of English Literature that he was professionally employed to establish the canon of and to teach, it does seem to me that being a Catholic in England was no less difficult than being queer, or Jewish, or an Elf or a Hobbit for that matter. I do not speak as a Catholic - and to be honest can hardly imagine doing so - but I do get a glimpse from studying Tolkien that the identity has much to do with the way that he looks at England with a subversive eye and imagines how it might and should have been. In Cambridge I still recall the great austere Gothic chapel of Kings College, the construction of which took a century that spanned the English reformation. At the older end, around one door part of one arch is painted - in bright wonderful colour! And when you look at this little painted detail you start to appreciate the original design, when the whole thing was to have been painted, with the vast coloumns trees with the ceiling the blue of the vaulted heavens above. But though they completed the building there was to be no more paint, and so ends England's Catholic art.

[Saranna]

This is a post intended to fall soon enough down the pile and into the detritus of old lore posts. Not at all as far as I can see, @Chrysophylax Dives To me it seems eminently well balanced and an important basis for further discussion.

Ever since people were people they have defined their own sense of selfhood by considering themselves better or more important than 'those others over there.' It's as if we must always be certain that there are 'worse' kinds of people for us to feel superior to. Our sense of self derives too often from a weeding out of all the things we believe ourselves not to be, that we don't want to be seen as. Thank heavens we know the right way to crack open our eggs, not like those philistines over the hill. It saddens me to think that The Plaza may perceive a need to tread softly on issues of life that have always been contentious, and yet humanity survives. Gender, Race, Religion. Social status?

I hope you're wrong about the detritus idea

[Silky Gooseness]

This is interesting but I’m not entirely sure what we’re talking about. Identity, and Tolkien, perhaps - but is the topic Tolkien’s identity? The identities of Tolkien readers? The identities of characters? The search in Tolkien’s writing for an English identity?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Well, I suppose it was a deliberately vague lamentation on the fact that the nature of Tolkien fandom closes down the really interesting issues for conversation. I'm not advocating for a change in site rules because i think it has to be this way. But the result is that some of the most interesting elements of Tolkien's thought falls through the cracks.

But yes, I suppose it is all about identity. And all of these identities that you mention are relevant, though in the first instance I'd say primarily the identities of Tolkien on the one hand, and us (diverse) readers on the other.

But its also a personal observation. I've spent many years now reading English thought from the 17th century through to the early 20th (it is what i do for a hobby!) and I have a fair sense of the canonical writers who Chambers reviews and of the nature and context of this tradition of English history writing. And it had just never occurred to me how that tradition looks to Catholic eyes. It was, as Sam Gamgee would say, an eye-opener.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hmm, I wrote earlier the start of a post and deleted it. But viewing over the questions and thoughts I might be able to shed an European light on matters than an English one. How someone identifies himself of herself, depends entirely on the social and economical society they are in, their ancestry and the people they grew up with and are surrounded by till present day. How someone identifies is a personal journey and from others it is not appreciated to tell how you should identify yourselves. It is extremely sensitive, because of the past before 1945. I feel that needs no explanation.

Identity is very complex and expresses itself the best in writing stories and tales, or reading them. Doing that for myself allows me to explore worlds that are beyond my daily scope to imagine. Lore never accomplished that with me. A part of my strength lay there to put a tale up as Battles of the Mind in the Gondolin section. In Rivvy's place are more of them. Storywriting is my window into how a diverse world our reality is and how the inhabitants respond to it. and this last I find extremely interesting at present. But if I can avoid to discuss gender, religion and sex related to lore I will. The biological history of the human species is interesting, but all sorts of philosophies around the topic are not.

[Fuin Elda]

Truthfully most people have only been able to openly identify themselves as they are in terms of gender, sexuality and religious preference in recent years. Less than fifty honestly for almost all of those and there are still hold outs in the world where you can't be a certain way.

As such I think it's hard to ever really know what a writer was, in eras gone by because one always looks at things through their own lens. My Breadcrumbs thread is from a decidedly alphabet mafia perspective and knowing a lot of the history of how we portrayed ourselves and the history of how things often happened and things were hidden from plain sight were we could. I remember reading some ridiculous book in high school and the teacher getting mad at us because it was written back in the early 1940's something like that? And NOT one of us got the euphemism that the characters were having sex. The teacher knew. The teacher was mad that we all got zero on that question on the test like it was an entire discussion after the test was graded. So I feel like it takes a specific knowledge being passed down from one generation to the next to get the subtext of certain writing styles and that if you aren't a part of that group you're far less likely to learn the codex.

While I am not a part of the Catholic faith a lot of my family is, though most moved away from Catholism to a Christian faith. The fun point is I purposely moved away I know a good amount of what I would call that codex, but when moving to the 'pagan' faiths it was interesting rereading a lot of those books that were Christian coded especially when you dabble into the older practices of the Christian faith as it really worked to assimilate and uproot the older faiths and seeing just how pagan coded they were which is how a lot of the new age beliefs have sprung back up.

I like to describe it as older writing likes to contain deep roots for ways of being that need to survive a hard long winter and sometimes the writers themselves aren't even realizing they are giving crumbs about such things so that others can identify with them later and help those roots grow anew!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

So I feel like it takes a specific knowledge being passed down from one generation to the next to get the subtext of certain writing styles and that if you aren't a part of that group you're far less likely to learn the codex.

I like to describe it as older writing likes to contain deep roots for ways of being that need to survive a hard long winter and sometimes the writers themselves aren't even realizing they are giving crumbs about such things so that others can identify with them later and help those roots grow anew!

Yes! I think that is exactly right. And it applies across the board to all sorts of elements of life - which broadly might be called 'queer' but extend beyond gender issues into whatever is 'taboo' at any moment. Since we talked here last - 18 months ago? - i had a breakthrough in my Tolkien research so that i finally understood, not so much Tolkien, but rather why the secondary literature on Tolkien is so bad. I spent a lot of time reading the early academic authorities (Chance 1979, Shippey 1982, Flieger 1983) on Tolkien's 1936 allegory of the Old English poem Beowulf as a tower.

In 1936 in London nobody - not speaker and not audience - could attend a lecture on an old poem of the old Germanic tradition without casting one eye on what was going on in their own day - 1936 sees the Berlin Olympics, Germany remilitarizing the Rhineland, civil war break out in Spain, and in London the Battle of Cable Street when the British Fascists - Mosley's Black Shirts - attempted to march through the East End of London. So, obviously, one can read this lecture, as also the allegory of the tower within it, in relation to the rise of German National Socialism.

But by 1979 the academics of the UK and North America were all still in a state of shock from the Holocaust, and they had spent four decades pruning their own academic disciplines of anything that might seem connected to racist ideology. All for the good, you might say? Not all. Because the result was that they absolutely could not read Tolkien!

Let me be clear. Tolkien makes subtle references to what is going on in 1936. That does not make him an antisemitic fascist! But by 1980s they could not read a hint of this kind of stuff without freaking out, and assuming that it pointed to Tolkien's antisemitics fascist leanings.

Once you twig to what is going on in this early Tolkien scholarship it is almost comical to watch them twist and wriggle. They smell something 'unkosher' and they go to great lengths to either: (1) brush it under the carpet so they do not have to write about it, or (2) hide it even from themselves. That is the foundation of Tolkien studies today!

It is all about the taboos shifting and changing but on a dimension that nobody quite sees or is aware of, so you never know how trapped you are in the silences of your own day.

Good to read you again Fuin Elda! Your Breadcrumbs thread made a revolution in Lore - or so i felt, but i may be biased.

PS. Here is footage from the Battle of Cable Street - song by a band i used to go see all the time back in the late 1980s. This is London in October - Tolkien gave his Beowulf lecture in London in November.

[Fuin Elda]

!

It is all about the taboos shifting and changing but on a dimension that nobody quite sees or is aware of, so you never know how trapped you are in the silences of your own day.

Good to read you again Fuin Elda! Your Breadcrumbs thread made a revolution in Lore - or so i felt, but i may be biased.

Indeed! I feel like the current taboo shift with Tolkien so much more towards feminism above even LGBT (There are a few people picking up the rainbow threads but I've seen numerous comments and even threads in this forum about Tolkiens treatment of women. Of course we are still of course dealing with racism in his works but at this point quite often I've noted it's people trying to say that Tolkien utterly excludes people of color from the heroic side of the stories and that because he did that newer adaptions should as well.

Currently the politics of identity change so rapidly right now though that it's not the same as even twenty or thirty years ago where things still moved much slower due to the decreased connectivity of the world.

(Also many thanks, to hear as much from you is a high compliment indeed as I do not consider myself a fixture in Lore by any means!)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Also many thanks, to hear as much from you is a high compliment indeed as I do not consider myself a fixture in Lore by any means!

Thing is, neither do i. i only knew Lore of the old plaza, and i always regarded it as something fascinating and fun to read, but not what i was about. when the nu plaza was born i was always hoping that Lore would revise, so i could be a reader once again. the first paradox of my nu plaza engagements has been that, until recently, i've been probably the main poster in Lore, while never really wanting to be. i just could not let it die.

the second paradox was my discovery that the wisdom that i rarely discerned in Lore discussions is found in heaps outside of Lore. i first discovered this in the Riddle thread. and while, obviously, the awesome mind of @Drifa has been a major revelation, I still remember when i first awoke to where the wisdom on the plaza was really at:

I am light of brightness, young of year
I am pastures, forests, gardens fair.

The Elessar of @Ercassie (some shards of which ended up in my short story entry back then).

And now I have come back this time, and to my wonder and surprise I found that Lore was not languishing. Plaza people were talking in Lore. And I discovered that this had much to do with the fact that we now have (if i may be so bold) a Lore Goose, and that plaza wisdom now rules in Lore.

It is amazing!

My Guide to Stairs, which i have been obsessively working on these last months (but now finished the first floor and taking a long breather) was in Lore. But I requested that it be taken out of Lore because, now that wisdom rules here, I can be candid about the fact I don't feel I really belong. Now I want to do my thing without upsetting the main show.

So what I am saying to you, Fuin, is that you and I should both be semi-permanent fixtures in Lore, because we both belong here a bit - and other places too.

[Rivvy Elf]

After planning and writing out my own epic I've come to realize that what an author doesn't write and elaborate on is just as, if not more, important as what they do write about. With Tolkien, for instance, he spends a lot of effort focusing on elven culture, everything from their psychology to their gestation and birthing logistics. Yet he does not elaborate at all on the dwarves or humans. With humans, there is a fairly obvious reason. We are human. Less is more in this instance. The more he writes and speculates about humanity, the more likely we'd distance ourselves from the humans of LOTR and find ourselves not relating to them. Or the more he'd risk alienating his audience.

This is evident on how a lot of us don't even know that hobbits are humans in LOTR. I believe Tolkien clarified that hobbits are indeed humans in one of his letters. A lot of us treat hobbits as their own thing, like elves and dwarves. And that is because Tolkien spent a lot of time clarifying the distinctions of hobbit culture to such a degree that a lot of us don't see hobbits as humans because all the differences are explicitly spelled out.

Another layer in complexity is that Tolkien saw a lot of deficiencies, gaps, and inconsistencies in his own writing. His own writing is marred just like the world he created, otherwise, why are there multiple drafts of prose? Why would he attempt to do a rewrite of the Hobbit? The issue with many literary folk is that they treat Tolkien's writing as static, that he was set in his ways and thinking. And that's just simply not true. Tolkien's thoughts and viewpoints changed, or at the very least, he realized that he needed to make it more clear to either himself and/or his readers that his thoughts were changing. I will illustrate two examples, Galadriel and Feanor, and the Blue Wizards.

His views on Galadriel and Feanor went in diverging directions by the end of his lifetime. Galadriel, based on the information I remembered in the Unfinished Tales, was being given more agency, more of a voice, and was in the process of being fleshed out as a powerhouse in Middle-Earth history. In one draft she literally fought with the Teleri against the Noldor. It was getting to the point where it wasn't any external reason that Galadriel couldn't go back to Valinor, it was all internal. Given that she fought with the Teleri, in one draft, she would've been on the "exception" list for exiles. Galadriel had ambitious desires, and she fulfilled a lot of those desires, but it was ultimately up to her on whether she wanted to go back to Valinor. That's how I see Galadriel evolving in the Unfinished Tales. She has agency the entire time. In my opinion, the direction Tolkien was taking her character would've led to her, not Feanor, becoming the defacto GEOAT (Greatest Elf of All Time). Unfortunately, Tolkien died before we could see the final result.

On the other hand, with Feanor, he was on the road of becoming arguably as equal of a villain as Sauron/Melkor. Feanor is said to be the Greatest Elf of All Time in the Silmarillion and his death was more mourned then the stealing of the Silmarils if I recall correctly. But Tolkien's views on him changed too as Tolkien grew older. In one of the drafts, Tolkien flat out had Feanor accidentally killing one of his sons in the burning of the ships. Then, Feanor in public tried to maintain a bravado and maintain face about it while the rest of his sons called him out. If Tolkien lived longer, Feanor could very well have been one of the great villains of Middle-Earth on the level of Sauron and Melkor. Thus, the mourning of Feanor would not have been his death, but moreso his corruption, which I would argue would be quite a compelling tale.

Another big instance of Tolkien's beliefs changing were his thoughts on the Blue Wizards. Originally, he thought that they became corrupted. Then his ideas turned a complete 180 degrees, asserting that the Blue Wizards were very successful, successful enough that without their actions in the East and South, Sauron would've won. What we can infer is that Tolkien, by the end of his life, believed "people of color" were key in Sauron's defeat, they were heroes and there were probably a lot of women warrior-heroes because of what we know about Tolkien's inclusion of the Wainriders. They were just off-screen. And we know that Tolkien thinks that the Eastern men of Middle-Earth are people similar to the Far East in our globe (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, etc.) I can make an educated guess that Tolkien didn't explicitly create prose on them because he knew they had their own mythologies, he did not have access to them, he was not an expert linguist in their languages, and he respected them. E.G Tolkien was completely against the Imperialism of Britain and the U.S against China.

These two instances show how Tolkien's very thoughts were changing, and one could use these as counterarguments to claims of anti-feminism and exclusion of races as heroes. Tolkien just didn't have enough time nor the resources to effectively communicate all of his evolving views on paper. Or, he may not have realized it himself. So what Tolkien didn't write ends up becoming just as important as what he did write. If he was not an expert in something and he wrote something on it, then that has a higher likelihood of either disrespecting the topic or alienating people. The problem is that there's much more room for interpretation for the former than the latter.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Rivvy Elf, i am behind on some posts - yours above is one. Forgive me please for mulling my own thoughts here for now...

Many of us have this old plaza mystique and the new plaza has this odd old vibe that never goes away...

speaking for myself, i think stepping from Lore to Riddles in the Dark gave me a false binary. Riddles may not be your choice of opiate, but for myself - well, as you have seen they blow my mind. And Drifa is a master riddler. and actually anyone who dips a toe in the water gets some sort of shock. this bedazzled me as to the rest of the plaza.

i'd now return to what i wrote with a generational model that should no doubt next be gendered. the basic point being that between old and new plazas people grew up. the natural - if painfully slow - result of this evolution was threefold: (a) the old lorists died or gave up or just lost their fairy sparkle - and vanished; (b) the old roleplayers etc also lost their sparkle, only not so entirely, and they did not vanish as had the old Lorists; (c) the old roleplayers etc began to step into Lore.

(c) is what i have proclaimed a revolution. (you gotta work with what you got.) (a) is just a fact of life. and (b) is also just a fact of life - and as i said, this side of the plaza did not die as did Lore: your good self, Aiks, many of you plugging away at your stories just as i plug away at my stairs. those very few of us who care about something or other.

But if there ever was a 'magic of roleplay' at the old plaza, i don't see the sparkle in the nu - beyond the riddle thread, of course.

[Rivvy Elf]

@Chrysophylax Dives in the old days I felt that magic in the Fall of Gondolin RPG in 06-07ish. I was young then, enjoyed the thrill of refreshing the page and seeing a new post.

Now I’ve found a different calling that is unfortunately taking much of my creativity. All my flint is there. None right now in rp.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Rivvy Elf: to be clear, i am not actually asking you to do anything about the Tree/Ent post. but it might be fun to push in some moment of boredom down the line. i find it useful in these obsessive plaza stints to scatter some eggs for later nourishment.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Who is claiming a revolution? I don't see one. I have been concentrating on Lore because it was easier to talk about these last years than coming up with posts. I am getting slowly my inspiration back to get into actual roleplay again. But all care around my dad was so much exhausting, it left me without it. That burden is gone. RP goes much slower than in the past. But two decades, it is a lot of years. So much has happened. I will be deriving my time between this section and the actual RP areas. I have found a couple of spirits who like surely an RP.

Rivvy: You're much younger than me.

I plugged myself away? I ain't recognising that. Nah, that is not true.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is a post intended to fall soon enough down the pile and into the detritus of old lore posts. This because it touches - only touches - on all the things that cannot be said, or at least can only be said obliquely because of danger of community explosion... Gender is the frontrunner, while issues of race surely remain impossible to discuss in our forum. This is a tragedy, because in Tolkien's stories we might learn what the historical seeds of modern racism actually are; he really has much to teach us. But the issue of race in the modern world remains too explosive to broach. The last taboo is religion, and I suspect that this one is also too divisive, though here I believe that Tolkien's discussion of paganism and Christianity in 'Beowulf' point the way.

Gender, race, and religion - and what about antisemitism? That was the one I was thinking about, of course, because I always do, being Jewish. What I really wanted, back in July, was to discuss on the plaza the great discovery of my Tolkien-Beowulf research, which concerns the astonishing reading of Genesis by the Anglo-Saxon poet - the 'fusion' of pagan and Christian that is also the key to Tolkien's art. Back then I was naive enough to think that the chief obstacle to such a discussion was the plaza's prohibition on religious discussion. Then in September someone said something to me on the plaza that struck me as an antisemitic insult, and I began to think again.

Then on October 7 Israel was subjected to genocidal attack and in the aftermath, watching the news from the West, I learned how widespread today is Jew-hatred. John Maynard Keynes once described an antisemite as someone who hates Jews more than he ought, and this captures very well the antisemitism of the English that I grew up with. It is a quiet hatred, and you can know someone for years before out of the blue comes a comment like 'Hitler should have finished the job.'

So as an addendum to this post, post-October 7, I should say that while the three hot potatos above are key, for myself there is a fourth. And today, post-October 7, this fourth explains my reasons for turning away from any Lore discussion of what I deem the really interesting bits of Tolkien. I am not accussing anyone here of antisemitism. But I am most certainly saying that, while my experience since October 7 has shown me that two or three of you are pure gold, on the whole, and speaking as a Jew, what trust I had in this community and what safety I felt here has evaporated.

[Rivvy Elf]

@Tree link me the post from September.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

No. I am not accusing anyone of antisemitism, and quite possibly there was no such intention behind the comment. It made me feel uneasy, is the only point, and after Oct. 7 that uneasiness has for me a different significance than it did before. The real point is not the comment but how I have felt on this site since October 7. What I needed, as a Jew, was to hear from other members that they shared my horror at what had just happened. That I did hear from a couple of members means the world to me; that I did not hear anything from others does not in any way, shape, or form make them antisemitic. It just means that I don't know what they think and, in the present context, therefore I do not trust them.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: I am sorry to learn you feel in such ways. I never know what people think or how they regard me, but I am not afraid of social stigmas that might be pasted on me. That tells something about the thinking of those who do, not me. I was already a bit wondering why such few replies came in this section of the Plaza, so this decision doesn't come to me as a surprise.

In regards to Beowulf and the other Tolkien essays we discussed them extensively here and I made of each of them a summary (on your suggestion) which can be found in my Little Corner. But at some point there comes a moment to move on to other subjects to discuss. How intensive, lovelingly and everything around my dad was these last seven years and when he died in April last year, I am moving on as well and dwelling no longer over those seven years. I found a job and waiting on a second interview to discuss planning, tasks and salary, and that has my primary focus now. I have many more plans with my life, but all has to wait a bit before I go to work. It requires from me trust, patience, friendliness and enthousaistm towards my new employer, even it takes three months when the date is set to begin.

As last, I can never lay claim to be how you are. I am not born like that, nor I grew up with a culture like yours. But what I can is respect anyone regardless gender, religion and background. And this includes you too. Trust is a twofolded way and the rules set for the Plaza are fair and square. Take care and I'll see you around, and you can always post in Gondolin.

I'll miss you, Aiks

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, trust is the key, eh?

I have come out of the other end of a dark tunnel, speaking of my inner state of being. Most of my issues concerning antisemitism and the plaza are in my head. But the view from my window reveals the issue to be real in the wider world - and more real than I had comprehended prior to October 7. So all I need from the plaza is a trust that my paranoia has real roots. I have not managed to achieve this trust with the current administration, for which I take full responsibility (as the last six months and more I have been somewhat out of my mind with real life on my doorstep). But most of the individuals whom I have engaged with on the plaza I have learned to trust, including, one or two especially. Trust does not mean that someone is an 'ally' (to use the nuplaza lingo), it just means that you have a sense of who someone is and accept them for who they are. Acceptance is possibly a key.

On the OP. Chambers really is important. He was an Anglo-Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. Tbh, the difference is a bit lost on me. But while both Tolkien and Chambers orientated themselves in relation to the wider British academic world very much by underlining their Catholicism, another fact of the matter is that both were products of the English education system, which since the days of Queen Elizabeth I was an Anglican institution, and remained a clerical system at Oxford until at least the 1880s, while University College London, the home of Chambers, was established in the 19th century as 'the Godless College' by the secular metropolitan political radicals. So these two Catholics are both very much English Catholic academics - but what that identity might mean remains an open question.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Trust is always a keypoint. We are all paranoid a bit some point, me included. I can be sometimes far too optimistic in matters, such a job I posted above about. The first interview went so well I thought this I have, but the second interview never took place, because the people at the location where I would come to work, would have no need of me. It was a wait of two months to hear that bummer. Holland is apparently not so lenient to people who cared for a long time for someone and see them back as workforce after a long time without it. As my doctor says, society is very unpredictable. I accepted and moved on.

The administration changes here every six to eight months or so, since this site came alive in 2021. Prior 2018 one could sit for years on an administration post, and there were not nominations and elections at all. The system is far more fairer than it was ever before. The function of administrator is often not a real pleasant position, for someone who is in the saddle, and it can put strains on existing online friendship, even it is for some time.

I know what war is, even I have never been in it myself. But I had four grandparents, who had my mom and dad during such a period in the 1940's. Two told me a lot throughout my youth what they went through, what they faced and what they had to do to survive. They were a bit paranoid at points too, just because of the constant fear and not knowing what the next morning could bring. And therefore I know that 7th October 2023 is a real significant date to you, I shall not counteract. We learn, we discover the real truth and we move on. I am not friends with everyone here on the Plaza. But I try to be as friendly or civil possible. I agree, "it just means that you have a sense of who someone is and accept them for who they are". Acceptance is a key. As you trust me, I trust you.

I can't answer you on what the real indentity is, because unlike you I never was part of the English educational system. My family background is Calvinistic/Lutheran. But that faith has no role in my life, I am not baptised, and saw only for some years the inside of Roman Catholic basic school, till 12 years old. We had song and bible stories in the last hour of the Wednesday morning each week. I remember those as fun and exciting to listen to. But don't ask me the details, it is forty years ago I was there. I believe you that Chambers is important, but the capacity is beyond my knowledge.