ironically, there are moments when you feel a myth passed by...

...and everything is ok...

excuse this seemingly pointless line, overly smoked with cheesy sentimentalisms, but it refers to something very down to earth. This is when I declare that books are down to earth: Joseph Campbell's THE POWER OF THE MYTH.

The reconstructed mosaic of THE story, this is. Strange to accept, after at least 16 years of positivistic education and half a life of street knowledge that leads to no faith other than "there is a zero defference between doing it and not doing it".
Briefly, Campbell is the slayer of cynicism. Cynicism brought about by the urban jungle, by daily fatalities, by the familiarity and vicinity of violence, by bad movies and bad sects, by good people that we leave behind and those inspirational ones we no longer have the guts to encounter...

So here is my book review. Why? Because i feel it speaks all languages, amnd this is still a dangerous thing to do.

I think The Power of the Myth is a rare anthology of dialogs that manages to almost exhaustively compile the human condition not into patterns, but energies. It does not talk about "being", but about "becoming (a transfiguration that starts from outside and ends within)" - that is my definition of a myth, and Powell's monomyth is a universal pattern manifesting itself subtly in all that is conceived and left by men, a verb flowing in the human guts, a verb that urges, stimulates, spurs towards a finality whether consciously or not. The paradigms that Campbell studies and unifies cross-culturally are disturbingly revealing and of a rare beauty. Why disturbing/ boundary-breaking? Because they incorporate and resolve millenary differences in a superbly down to earth wisdom married to metaphor. Visionary? Not even, because he does not preach anything.

He just reviews the puzzle of the world through the unified glass of the myths, seen comparatively and beyond the conditioning borders of historical and religious determinism, if you will.

I watched and read Campbell's "The Power of the Myth" and felt as if an alien had decrypted the cannons of human culture. beyond the thorough richness of literacy, there is immense lucidity. It must have been a tremendous exercise of de-culturation, where the learned certainties are requestioned profoundly and without resentment, and then an exercise of reconnecting everything, every sign, symptom and strand into a beautifully revealing genotype of the human spirit. In great lines, this is it: the anthropological bible.

I am not even by far saying he is the first to conduct such a study, but I find he is the first to formulate it so simply and charmingly. So easily to pass over. Like it had been dead obvious all along. Therapeutic? Inspirational? I do not know. It is surely something that is meant to integrate you with yourself.