“If anguish were visible,” J.R.R. Tolkien told his son, nearly the whole planet would disappear under a dense dark cloud.

He wrote that in the spring of 1944. Christopher was at an air force training camp in South Africa, and his father sat in Oxford, missing him and following a war with no end in sight. Tolkien confessed that the sum of human misery in the world appalled him, the millions of people parted from the ones they loved. He knew the news. He also admitted how little the news let him see. No one, he wrote, can tell what the present moment means in the long run of eternity.