The other night I was reading a book by a man with lifelong interests in science and literature. He mentioned Henry David Thoreau's incandescent opening chapter of Walden, with its powerful statement on man's relationship with nature. This led to my having to go find Walden, pull it off the shelf, and dip into the first chapter, which is titled "Economy." I remembered having a strong reaction of my own to Thoreau's opening pages the first time I read the book almost 30 years ago.
I should say "the first time I read the book all the way through," because I'm pretty sure I had tried to read it before, probably while I was in college, without getting very far. It was another example of a book whose time hadn't yet come for me. I'm not sure what prompted me to pick it up again that particular autumn, when I was struggling not so much to find the meaning of life as to find an employer who required the skills of an English M.A. It was a rather discouraging juncture, which was probably what put me in the mood for philosophy.
Something Thoreau said stopped me in my tracks, so applicable did it seem, almost as if he had reached out across time to say something I needed to hear. The experience was similar to the one I had in seeing Joseph Campbell for the first time on public television (which hadn't happened yet when I was reading Thoreau). It's safe to say I wasn't used to those types of peak experiences, and the force of it was almost as if Thoreau had clapped me on the shoulder.
In after years, I went back to locate this statement that had affected me so strongly, and--guess what? I couldn't find it! So much of what Thoreau says in the first chapter is memorable, and I kept reading one beautifully observed statement after another without recognizing the one. What! How could this be? I was left to consider the possibility that in all the living I had done post-Thoreau my experience might have expanded to encompass a few more of his observations. The one that had struck me so forcibly in the beginning was now one of many.
When I was leafing through the book the other night, I decided to try once again to locate the statement I'd once taken as a motto. Reading at leisure, late at night, by lamplight, I suddenly recognized it and remembered why it had moved me so much when I was in my 20s, out of tune with my surroundings and wondering when life would start falling into place. "But man's capacities have never been measured," wrote Thoreau, "nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, 'be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou has left undone?' "
I now see that the last part of Thoreau's quote is from the Vishnu Purana, a Hindu scripture, so that in effect Thoreau was speaking along with the Hindu sages of long ago, speaking with them in unison. No wonder the statement had seemed like a revelation. These words greatly encouraged me then and helped me believe that, no matter how disappointing the present was, there was so much more life ahead, and some of it was bound to be better.
Thoreau had been dead for 125 years when his words moved me; Joseph Campbell died right around the time I was reading Walden, perhaps the very week, and the following year I heard him say "Follow your bliss" on PBS. Dead white males, both, and father figures. Mentors come in all sizes and shapes, living and dead, and I say, never ignore a good piece of advice.
Showing posts with label Joseph Campbell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Campbell. Show all posts
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Inner Resources
It's been a moderately quiet week around here, with nothing very unexpected going on, except that I ended up writing a poem. This came about because I forgot to take a book with me to Starbucks last weekend. I was annoyed when I got there and found I had nothing to read, but on the other hand . . . it's good to test your inner resources sometimes.
First I decided to clean out my purse. I found a collection of miscellaneous receipts (mostly from Starbucks), expired and unexpired coupons, and a movie ticket stub, along with a couple of bank slips. There were also some notes I'd forgotten I had from an online course on Joseph Campbell. I'd jotted them down on a series of blue Post-Its that ended up in one of the pockets of my purse. Why they were in my purse and not in a drawer is a question I can't answer, but it did solve the problem of having nothing to read.
I suppose that once you've written a book of your own, you're just naturally more opinionated about things; at any rate, I found on reading the notes that I was a little annoyed by the professor's ideas. The topic was Campbell's concept of the hero's journey, and I had a different idea of what it means than did the lecturer, who thought Campbell's monomyth was too impersonal. Part of the problem, too, was that I had just finished that course on medieval philosophy a couple of weeks ago and was bursting with ideas on the universal and the particular.
The result of it all was that after reading the notes, I started scribbling a poem on a blank Post-It as a response (though not a very serious one) to the discussion of the universal versus the particular. It ended up being two haiku strung together:
Plato's Cat
Universal cat
Do you ever crave tuna?
Does Plato feed you?
If you chanced to meet
A nice, particular cat
Would it make you glad?
(I know haiku are supposed to be about nature, but I use them for a lot of things. It's my all-occasion poetic form, with apologies to its true masters. I was once asked to bring a limerick to a wedding shower and ended up writing a haiku instead because it felt more comfortable. If you really want to stretch the form, try writing about a cracker dish.)
Feeling better, I left Starbucks to go home. I had to stop on the way for milk and apples, and when I got out of the car, I noticed two things: a single star in the still bright sky paired with the top of a very tall evergreen and an odd effect of the setting sun that produced dramatic rays across an expanse of sky, something akin to zodiacal light. Either or both would have been worthy of a proper haiku, but I haven't written it yet. Maybe I will next time I'm in Starbucks without a book.
First I decided to clean out my purse. I found a collection of miscellaneous receipts (mostly from Starbucks), expired and unexpired coupons, and a movie ticket stub, along with a couple of bank slips. There were also some notes I'd forgotten I had from an online course on Joseph Campbell. I'd jotted them down on a series of blue Post-Its that ended up in one of the pockets of my purse. Why they were in my purse and not in a drawer is a question I can't answer, but it did solve the problem of having nothing to read.
I suppose that once you've written a book of your own, you're just naturally more opinionated about things; at any rate, I found on reading the notes that I was a little annoyed by the professor's ideas. The topic was Campbell's concept of the hero's journey, and I had a different idea of what it means than did the lecturer, who thought Campbell's monomyth was too impersonal. Part of the problem, too, was that I had just finished that course on medieval philosophy a couple of weeks ago and was bursting with ideas on the universal and the particular.
The result of it all was that after reading the notes, I started scribbling a poem on a blank Post-It as a response (though not a very serious one) to the discussion of the universal versus the particular. It ended up being two haiku strung together:
Plato's Cat
Universal cat
Do you ever crave tuna?
Does Plato feed you?
If you chanced to meet
A nice, particular cat
Would it make you glad?
(I know haiku are supposed to be about nature, but I use them for a lot of things. It's my all-occasion poetic form, with apologies to its true masters. I was once asked to bring a limerick to a wedding shower and ended up writing a haiku instead because it felt more comfortable. If you really want to stretch the form, try writing about a cracker dish.)
Feeling better, I left Starbucks to go home. I had to stop on the way for milk and apples, and when I got out of the car, I noticed two things: a single star in the still bright sky paired with the top of a very tall evergreen and an odd effect of the setting sun that produced dramatic rays across an expanse of sky, something akin to zodiacal light. Either or both would have been worthy of a proper haiku, but I haven't written it yet. Maybe I will next time I'm in Starbucks without a book.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Peripatetic
It took a while, but I finally tracked down a copy of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America at the library. I started looking for it years ago, but the main library's copy always seemed to be checked out or missing. Being a fan of both travel writing and John Steinbeck, I was looking forward to reading this memoir, and my only disappointment is that it isn't a longer book.
Maybe it was fate that I never got a chance to read Travels with Charley before. I know I read it in a different way, perhaps with a sharper eye, than I would have even a few years ago. I've traveled some of the same roads as Steinbeck in recent years and was especially interested in the parts of his trip that overlapped with mine.
I've long had an image of Mr. Steinbeck as what you might call a "man's man." It was only recently that I came across a photo of him in his prime that reveled how handsome he was; at six feet tall with those piercing eyes he must have cut quite a figure. It's charming to imagine him traveling about with Charley, his poodle, camping out, and talking to people everywhere without being recognized by any of these strangers. His account of the journey reveals him to be open-minded and deeply thoughtful, with a good sense of humor, though you can tell all that by reading his fiction.
One thing struck me especially, and that was his description of the loneliness that descended on him at the outset of his trip. He missed his wife and, after starting out from Sag Harbor, New York, reunited with her during a stopover in Chicago, not even a quarter of the way through his travels. When they parted for the second time, he was just as lonely as before. I had imagined Mr. Steinbeck as somewhat stoic and was surprised and delighted to read about how regularly he called home and how much he missed it. It made him seem more human and less godlike.
Mr. Steinbeck found Wisconsin especially beautiful; he was prevented from traveling through Yellowstone National Park by Charley's open hostility toward bears; a native of Monterey County, California, he smelled the Pacific Ocean while still far inland; and he made the same trip from Bakersfield to Needles and the Arizona border that I once did (though the roads may be different now). He went quail-hunting in Texas without seeing any quail, but he did catch some fish. He traveled from Amarillo to New Orleans, skirting the Atchafalaya Basin, and witnessed a piece of the desegregation drama then taking place in Louisiana.
Early on, he had gotten lost in a small town in New York, and near the end of his trip, he got lost in New York City, not far from home. In all of this, he captured the bittersweet quality of setting out and leaving behind better perhaps than anyone else I've ever read.
Mr. Steinbeck died when I was quite young. I would have liked to have known him; so much of his personality comes through in his writing that in some ways I feel I do. I once spent a pleasant afternoon visiting his hometown and looking in at the Steinbeck Center, where I read a letter he had written containing a humorous response to the proposal of having a school named after him. I've visited Ed Ricketts' rebuilt lab in Monterey, even summoning up the courage to climb the stairs and peek in. (I received the surprise of my life when I glimpsed a group of men sitting around, apparently shooting the breeze. I beat a fast retreat but not before getting the impression that I'd just witnessed a scene much like the ones Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their cronies would have enacted many times in their day. It's nice to think that some things don't change.)
There's also the matter of the Joseph Campbell connection. He was one of their group of friends, and apparently he, like Steinbeck, was influenced by Ricketts' writings on nature and philosophy. When I was visiting the Monterey area all those years ago, reading Cannery Row and thinking about Steinbeck, I wasn't aware that a few years and a few miles down the road, I'd be the recipient of some of that influence when I started my own studies of mythology. How strange that the winding road that led from John Steinbeck to Joseph Campbell and back again, many times, has not only philosophical and literary layers but also geographic ones.
Maybe it was fate that I never got a chance to read Travels with Charley before. I know I read it in a different way, perhaps with a sharper eye, than I would have even a few years ago. I've traveled some of the same roads as Steinbeck in recent years and was especially interested in the parts of his trip that overlapped with mine.
I've long had an image of Mr. Steinbeck as what you might call a "man's man." It was only recently that I came across a photo of him in his prime that reveled how handsome he was; at six feet tall with those piercing eyes he must have cut quite a figure. It's charming to imagine him traveling about with Charley, his poodle, camping out, and talking to people everywhere without being recognized by any of these strangers. His account of the journey reveals him to be open-minded and deeply thoughtful, with a good sense of humor, though you can tell all that by reading his fiction.
One thing struck me especially, and that was his description of the loneliness that descended on him at the outset of his trip. He missed his wife and, after starting out from Sag Harbor, New York, reunited with her during a stopover in Chicago, not even a quarter of the way through his travels. When they parted for the second time, he was just as lonely as before. I had imagined Mr. Steinbeck as somewhat stoic and was surprised and delighted to read about how regularly he called home and how much he missed it. It made him seem more human and less godlike.
Mr. Steinbeck found Wisconsin especially beautiful; he was prevented from traveling through Yellowstone National Park by Charley's open hostility toward bears; a native of Monterey County, California, he smelled the Pacific Ocean while still far inland; and he made the same trip from Bakersfield to Needles and the Arizona border that I once did (though the roads may be different now). He went quail-hunting in Texas without seeing any quail, but he did catch some fish. He traveled from Amarillo to New Orleans, skirting the Atchafalaya Basin, and witnessed a piece of the desegregation drama then taking place in Louisiana.
Early on, he had gotten lost in a small town in New York, and near the end of his trip, he got lost in New York City, not far from home. In all of this, he captured the bittersweet quality of setting out and leaving behind better perhaps than anyone else I've ever read.
Mr. Steinbeck died when I was quite young. I would have liked to have known him; so much of his personality comes through in his writing that in some ways I feel I do. I once spent a pleasant afternoon visiting his hometown and looking in at the Steinbeck Center, where I read a letter he had written containing a humorous response to the proposal of having a school named after him. I've visited Ed Ricketts' rebuilt lab in Monterey, even summoning up the courage to climb the stairs and peek in. (I received the surprise of my life when I glimpsed a group of men sitting around, apparently shooting the breeze. I beat a fast retreat but not before getting the impression that I'd just witnessed a scene much like the ones Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their cronies would have enacted many times in their day. It's nice to think that some things don't change.)
There's also the matter of the Joseph Campbell connection. He was one of their group of friends, and apparently he, like Steinbeck, was influenced by Ricketts' writings on nature and philosophy. When I was visiting the Monterey area all those years ago, reading Cannery Row and thinking about Steinbeck, I wasn't aware that a few years and a few miles down the road, I'd be the recipient of some of that influence when I started my own studies of mythology. How strange that the winding road that led from John Steinbeck to Joseph Campbell and back again, many times, has not only philosophical and literary layers but also geographic ones.
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