Dunno

Well, I finished reading the book a month or so ago, and I suppose I could go back and review the last chapters and try to say something about them, but I don't think I will. I don't really care at the moment.

While I find some pieces of the book interesting and helpful, as a whole I find it kind of disappointing. I think this has a lot to do with the style of the book: There's a lot of meandering and poking into myths and dream stories, which produces some nice, lyrical paragraphs, but there's not a lot of wrapping up or analysis ... at least none that sticks with me as useful or viable. I don't feel like it's significantly changed the way I think about the world. Maybe, though, that has to do with how much time and thought I've put into the book. Maybe I'm expecting the analysis to be done for me, when this book presents itself as sort of loosely-bound, and expects me to do the analysis myself. Or maybe I can find a few interesting questions elicited by the book, and let those ends dangle for future investigation.

I think that for me, the most interesting questions that the book asks are about meaning-making. I think we agree with Campbell's implication that stories are important to people, and that the things we tell stories about must somehow be tied into human nature, because the same themes keep popping up in stories all around the world. We can also probably agree that these stories are somehow related to big, abstract things like our societal values and subconscious desires.

But what happens if these worldview-grounding stories lose their credibility? What happens if they come to be perceived as uninteresting, or even as false? Will human nature demand that other stories take their place? Will we lose a sense of what things mean? Will we find some way to understand stories as both true and false, demystifying it while still preserving its power?

For help, I should probably read that last section again before I return my month-overdue, out-of-renewals book. But even if I do, I figure this is my last post on HWTF.

Farewell, book!