Hors de Combat

My friend Batya Reckson sent me a link to a short video recorded by Joseph Campbell almost 30 years ago. It's called “Myth as a Mirror for Ego” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgOUxICCHoA&feature=channel). Campbell (1904-1987) was an influential writer and lecturer in comparative mythology and comparative religion. When I read his biographical entry in the invaluable Wikipedia, I was embarrassed that I had never heard of him, as if I had been living in a cave all these years. But thanks to Batya, I’ve come across him at the right time.

In “Myth as a Mirror for Ego,” Campbell tells us that myths create a mirror for us, a mirror with a schedule on it that shows us where we should be at any stage of life, based on age-old patterns from infancy to old age. A 40-year-old man who wonders if his mother will punish him, for example, “has not moved on” according to Campbell. At that age a forty-year old should be a free, independent, and responsible person, who acts with qualities of a “noble heart.” Similarly, an 80-year-old who wonders about his golf score has not moved on.

Campbell, who was one month shy of his 79^th birthday when he recorded this mini-lecture – just a few months younger than I am now – says that an old person must realize that “I’m not participating in the achievement of life. I have achieved it.” Yet I have friends and colleagues in their late seventies and early eighties, now viewed by younger practitioners as Grand Old Men and Women, who continue to lecture and publish, as engaged in their work as ever. This does not mean that they have not “moved on,” in line with what Campbell calls the “patterned mirror” offered by myth. They are simply doing what they love to do and doing it for its own sake and not for the sake of their careers. Indeed, Campbell himself continued his professional work well into old age.

But it’s been hard for me to watch achievement wave goodbye. For the past 45 years I've worked on one project after another, but no more. Only recently have I put aside the manuscript on which I’d been working for several years. I’d been unable to make it jell, at least not as a trade book. Had I enjoyed the work more I would have continued with it, but whatever enthusiasm I had for the project - and it was never great to begin with - waned over time, until I was simply going through the motions. Still, I felt bad that I was hors de combat, so to speak, no longer in the game.

Campbell’s little talk made me realize that at my stage of life it’s appropriate not to be working towards a goal, not to be oriented towards the future. It was reassuring to hear him say “it’s a wonderful moment that comes when you realize I’m not striving for anything, and what I’m doing now is not a means for achieving something later.” After a certain age, Campbell says, there is no future and suddenly the present becomes rich, valuable for itself.

I will do my best then to appreciate the present, to live in the moment for its own sake. That’s all there is, after all. The past is gone, the future is uncertain, but the present is here right now, in all its vibrant immediacy. Everyday routines – breakfast with my wife, morning coffee with the newspaper, chatting with friends at a café, a phone call from my children, even putting out the trash – are precious. That’s what the ghost of Our Town’s Emily Webb missed and desperately wanted back. That’s what I’ll try to capture now, while I still can.