[This is an excerpt from the book - The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell. It is a discussion between Campbell and Bill Moyers]
Moyers: Why myth? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?
Campbell: My first response would be, "Go on, live your life, it is good life - you don't need mythology." I don't believe in being being interested in a subject just because it is said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with proper introduction, mythology will catch you.
One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We are interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. No more our attention goes to the inner life and to the magnificent human heritage we have in our great tradition - Plato, Confucius, the Buddha, Goethe and others who speak of eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives. When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life - well, if you dont know where it is or what it is, you will be sorry.
Greek and Latin and biblical literature used to be part of everyone's education. Now, when these were dropped, a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what is happening to you. These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with teh themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, an informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you dont know what the guide signs are along the way, you have t work it out yourself. But once this subject catches you, there is such a feeling, from one or another of these traditions, of information of a deep, rich, life vivifying sort that you dont want to give it up.
Moyers: So we tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality?
Campbell: I think so, yes. Novels - great novels - can be wonderfully instructive. In my twenties and thirties and even into my forties, James Joyce and Thomas Mann were my teachers. I read everything they wrote. Both were writing in terms of what might be called the mythological traditions. Take, for example, the story of Tonio, in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger. Tonio's father was a substantial businessman, a major citizen in his hometown. Little Tonio, however, had an artistic temperament, so he moved to Munich and joined a group of literary people who felt themselves above the mere money earners and family men.
So here is Tonio between two poles: his father, who was a good father, responsible and all of that, but who never did the one he wanted to in all his life - and, on teh other hand, the one who leaves his hometown and becomes a critic of that kind of life. But Tonio found that he really loved these hometown people. ANd although he thought himself a little superior in an intellectual way to them and could describe them with cutting words, his heart was nevertheless with them.
But when he left to live with the bohemians, he found that they were so disdainful of life that he couldn't stay with them either. So he left them and wrote a letter back to someone in the group, saying, "I admire those cold, proud beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise mankind; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor. Indeed to me it even seems that this must be that love of which it is written that one may 'speak of the tongues of men and of angels', yet, lacking love, be 'as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.'"
And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that is a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is describing his imperfections. The perfect being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true world, it hurts. But it goes with love. That is what Mann called "erotic irony", the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.
Moyers: I cherish that image: my hometown love, the feeling you get for that place, no matter how long you have been away or even if you never return. That was where you first discovered people. But why do you say you love people for their imperfections?
Campbell: Aren't children lovable because they are falling down all the time and have little bodies with heads too big? And these funny little dogs that people have - they are lovable because they are so imperfect.
Moyers: Perfection would be a bore, wouldn't it?
Campbell: It would have to be. It would be inhuman. That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there is no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It is the Christ on the cross, that becomes lovable.
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're all seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it is all finally about, and that is what these clues help us to find within ourselves.
It is about experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's meaning of a flower? What is the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. That's it. And your own meaning is that you're there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.
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