Luxury or Comfort

This morning driving to work, I was listening to a series of lectures about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit by scholar Joseph Pearce.  In the course of talking about the book, Pearce quoted the first two sentences of chapter one:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.

As he read, I finished the quote—incorrectly. Instead of “that means comfort,” I, in the privacy of my car said, “that means luxury.” Well, that says more about me and I suspect many others than I’d like. Tolkien and the Bilbo Baggins valued comfort. We value luxury. Bilbo had a fireplace for his cooking; I want a Wolf range.

Comfort comes from the Latin com-fortis meaning strong. Luxury comes from the Latin luxuria meaning rankness or excess. Comforts strengthen and console us. Luxury is more than is reasonable and too often weakens us and makes us want more and more and more.

Perhaps my misquote was the result of the brand new Audi S6 that passed me along the way or perhaps, to use Tolkien’s imagery, it was the dragon in me. While Hobbits love comfort, dragons are the ones on Middle Earth who love luxury. For a dragon, enough is never enough. More is always better even if you can't use anything you own.

Now I realize that the whole point of The Hobbit is breaking away from comfort. Comfort blocks the way to adventures and it's only in the adventure of the journey to Lonely Mountain that Bilbo learns heroic virtue. Having said that, I suspect that for many of us just breaking away from our craving for luxury to be content with comfort could be the first step on a journey that, as it becomes an adventure, teaches us heroic virtue as well.