Rating: 
Summary: Infinity in a flower...
Review: Within the academic world where he spent the better part of his career, the late Joseph Campbell had a somewhat unique approach to the study, interpretation, and understanding of mythology. Whereas his fellow scholars most often approached the subject with an analytic eye, Campbell suggested an alternative way --using the artistic eye. In "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" Campbell suggested myths "were not manufactured" that they were "spontaneous productions of the psyche" and that each reflected the "germ power of the source."In A JOSEPH CAMPBELL COMPANION, Diane Osborn has assembled excerpts from Campbell's many works, and distilled the central ideas Campbell wrote about over the years concerning the origin and purpose of myths. She has organized these excerpts into topical areas: "In the Field", "Living in the World", "Coming into Awareness", and "Living in the Sacred." Although the topics can be viewed as linear, reflecting the progress of the soul or psyche, I suspect Campbell would have suggested they are also cyclical and that one exists in all four simultaneously. I feel the last section of the Campbell Companion, "Living in the Sacred", contains some particularly insightful notions regarding the nature of art and artistic endeavor, and the role of art in affecting human lives. In this section, Osborn has quoted heavily from Campbell's "Myths to Live By" and provided quotations from several of the artists who affected Campbell's own life and writing including James Joyce and Walt Whitman. For example, Campbell describes how the words of the German writer Schiller, in answer to a friend's problem with 'writer's block' -- "Your problem is that you bring in the critical factor before the lyical factor has had a chance to express itself" -- affected his own thinking and writing. Campbell says he had allowed the criticism of other "scholars" to interfere with his artistic processes, and that Schiller's words freed him to get on with "seeing" and "hearing" what myths could teach him. "Mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recoginzed as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity'that is whole and entire in each....The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind."
Rating:
Summary: my favorite book
Review: Wow! This book is really amazing and life changing for me--and I think for anyone who would be willing to go through it. It's amazing...It's not preachy, it includes personal insights and experiences by Joseph Campbell. I think everyone should read this book!
| 
