It can be joy to read this book which is entirely a conversation between the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the PBS journalist Bill Moyers – both being uber-erudite. Whether the joy turns into boredom and annoyance or continues to the end depends on your mindset. For Campbell myths are what we humans conceive to make sense of the world and our lives and our relation with the world. All stories and rites and traditions should be looked at in this perspective. Myth are not things of the antiquity; they’re present in many forms and provide meaning and direction to all facets of our personal and social lives. Campbell and Moyers go on and on about this. There are a lot of pretty passages in this book that you want to underline and quote.

I tell you what I think Campbell needed. He needed a healthy dose of cynicism. He was too engrossed with his academic studies in mythology and failed to see anything other than beauty and poetry and life-affirming allegories in myths and traditions. Ignorance, bigotry, cruelty, misogyny, xenophobia, exploitation of the weak by the strong, and other such unpleasant things have no place in his mythology. Every myth and every tradition is a deep and beautiful allegory that helps us find “our bliss.” Two thirds through the book I decided I had enough of it. But then, I’m not a Zen master exactly.