Who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

Sarah and I got to watch the Colbert show live in the summer of 2016. It was the day primary results confirmed to everyone that Donald Trump had taken control of the Republican party. Stephen Colbert wisecracked his way through much of his opening monologue, but when he got to the part where he acknowledged this news, he crumpled down on the floor in mock despair which, in hindsight, was probably something other than completely performative. My heart went out to him.

Watching him do his thing live was inspiring to me in the sense that it’s always a joy watching people do what I suspect they’re made to do. But it was also an extra kind of special insofar as I sometimes wish I was doing something similar to what he does. I witnessed his struggle to hold a particular taping together as a popular curator of thoughtfulness; not wanting to be pushy or preachy, keeping it mindful while also keeping it funny. I could see that it was a little exhausting. A degree of envy gave way to a deeper feeling of admiration. There was a righteous song and dance afoot which, we’ve seen since, often crosses a line into the prophetic. The moment has already sunk to the bottom of the Internet for many of us, but, less than a month ago, Colbert called his former guest, the President of the United States, a fascist.

The delicate but culturally crucial work he undertakes is the subject of a really wonderful piece in Vanity Fair. At the center of it is a question Tom Bombadil put to Frodo: “Who are you alone, yourself, and nameless?” A lot of folks who talk Lord of the Rings seem to forget that, for all the drama, Tom Bombadil is the one to whom most everyone, Gandalf included, ultimately defers. There’s something like the poetic authority of infinite play, of not trying to master, correct, control, or dictate in this presence, this entity, this form of holiness. I give a lot of thought to Tom Bombadil and I’m moved to see that Colbert does too. I want to be a little more like both of them.

One more thing, the above image is from a short film by Spike Jonze which, it seems to me, speaks to the ways Colbert has managed to dramatize his own inner life into something publicly beautiful together with others. Peter Jackson, perhaps out of necessity, steered clear of Tom Bombadil in his adaptation of Lord of the Rings. I’d love to see Spike Jonze offer an interpretation of the Bombadil passages in film.