What a mess!

  So the detritus of four decades of reading lie in a motley pile against a wall and two empty bookshelves beckon invitingly.   

  Where to start? 

  Easy. Start with the foundational stuff. 

  First came Will Durant and his wonderfully readable eleven volume Story of Civilization. More like the ‘Story of Western Civilization’ mind you, given that only the first volume deals substantially with India, China, and Japan. Though Islam does get numerous chapters from The Age of Faith on. 

  But where’s the pattern to make sense of it all? The underlying trajectory, the course of Life that would cast light on who and where we are today? 

  So next to Durant on the shelf has to be Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, in both abridged and unabridged editions, hard cover and soft. Spengler is all pattern, all Flow of Life, and calls his work a ‘morphology of history.’ That he treats of human communities and specifically civilizations as living organic beings was a revelation to me. Deep stuff, but all to do with organic expressive forms of Life through the course of history. 

  Speaking of ‘the expressive forms of Life,’ let’s not forget the work of David Attenborough, who’s Life on Earth wraps up with a chapter on ‘homo culturalus.’ That will have to be filed alongside, perhaps the culmination, of Richard Leakey’s The Making of Mankind and People of the Lake. Our ten thousand year teaching and understanding of history perches precariously on a million years of prehistoric development that simply cannot be ignored if we are to fathom our deepest ongoing instinctual urges and predilections. 

  Which brings me neatly to Joseph Campbell. Now there are the reasonably well known Power of Myth and Hero With a Thousand Faces among others of his works. All well and good, but his Masks of God series is the kicker, what I call the greatest achievement of the twentieth century. To me it is so vast and comprehensive it cannot be taught in schools. After all, what department could it possibly be shoehorned into? Anthropology, History, Mythology, Psychology, Religious Studies, Social Studies, Literature, Art History? Four or five times now I’ve read it from front to back (currently half way through volume four again.) Naturally I’ve never met anyone who has read so much as a line of it.

Sucks to be me, as the saying goes I guess. 

  The Masks are Durant, Spengler and Attenborough all rolled into one, a psycho-spiritual history of the human race to the present day with its beginnings in the murky darkness of a million years ago. 

  Dang it, this post is stretching out and I’ve just begun my task! Not even two shelves on my two units filled. 

  Oh well, a good motto in Life is…

  Tomorrow’s an other day!