The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

Heraclitus said strife is the creator of all great things.

Joyce’s formula for the aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object—such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor—rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through. MOYERS:

I’ve lost a lot of friends, as well as my parents. A realization has come to me very, very keenly, however, that I haven’t lost them. That moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there’s a kind of intimation of immortality in that.

Karlfried Graf Dürckheim says, “When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey.”