Is Our Misery in Vain?

J.R.R. Tolkien

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days — quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil . . . . 

[But] no man can estimate what is really happening in the present sub specie aeternitatis*. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success — in vain: preparing always only the soil in which unexpected good will sprout.

From a letter to his son Christopher (written in 1944)

*under the form of eternity