Qoheleth — "the Preacher" — writes from inside the wisdom tradition associated with Solomon. He is speaking to the kind of person who has tried to make sense of life from under the sun and has come up short. Ecclesiastes is the Bible's most honest book about the limits of unaided human reason.

From the writers we read together

J.R.R. Tolkien

philologist, novelist, Catholic, author of The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien argued that the universal human longing for stories of eucatastrophe — the sudden joyous turn just before disaster — is not a coping mechanism. It is a homing signal. The longing for an ending we cannot quite imagine is, he said, the heart's witness that an ending exists.

Qoheleth says the same thing in older words. God has put eternity in your heart. That is why no good day stays good enough, why every beautiful thing aches a little, why you cannot fully fit into your own life. You are not malfunctioning. You are remembering a country you have not yet been to.