Campbell - Refusal of the Call

I - Departure
    2 - Refusal of the Call







"Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests.  Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative.  Walled in boredom, hard work and "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.  His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless - even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown.  Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide him from his Minotaur.  All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Aegypt - Intimations or Evocations of Pre-existence

"The task had been to forget, of course...the task had been to forget, to become clothed in forgetfulness as in robes and armor, robes over armor, layer upon layer, so that he could come to pass disguised into this sad city."


..............................

"You don't belong here," Beau Brachman said to Pierce.
"No?"
"No....Even though you've forgotten it," Beau said, "you're really from somewhere else.  This is not your world, even though it seems to be.  This cosmos.  You arrive into it, come from a long way away, sort of stunned from the long journey, you forget you were on a journey at all.  You started out an astral body, but during your journey you come to be clothed in material reality, in matter, like an overcoat.  Inside is still the astral body.  But now bound and asleep....And no matter how far back we travel, we won't reach home again till we reach God.  From where we started."

John Crowley
Aegypt

Aegypt - Meaning

"My lord life is strange.  How is that Meaning comes to be?  How?  How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of person or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?"

Aegypt
John Crowley

Aegypt - Crossroads

"...that sense of collision...as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from different far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants with jewel sewn in their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children."

Aegypt
John Crowley

Evocative in meaning and just a gorgeous passage.

Aegypt - A poignant description of the 60's

"They're just going to dream their new world-age into being, Pierce marveled; but how otherwise do new world-ages come to be?  You have to be on their side, he thought, you have to be:  a pity and a love welled up within him for the children, the ragged ranks on pilgrimage along the only way there was to go, after all, making up the future as they went.  And in the thought cloud over every head a single question mark."

Aegypt
John Crowley

Aegypt - A Little About Both (History and Vocation that is)

"He hadn't lost his vocation, he had only grown up; he had desired to grow up and there would have been no way to prevent it even if he hadn't desired it.  History, that undiscovered country he had seen far off - yes, it had turned out to be only ordinary, different from his own not in kind but only in tedious details of geography and local custom, lists of which he had had to commit to memory:  he knew, for he had explored that country, of course, just as he had wanted to; he lived there every working day.

His progress had always been outward, away from stories, away from marvels;  it had been a journey, as he saw it, away from childhood, the same journey outward that the human race had long been on, and which he, Pierce Moffett, was only recapitulating in his own ontogeny, joining up with it, at his maturity, at the place it had by then reached.

....He had something fearfully wrong.

....Did the world have a plot?  Had it only seemed to lack one because he had forgotten his own?"



"If he thought there was no story in history, just one damned thing after another, Barr had said, it was only because he had ceased to recognize himself."

Aegypt
John Crowley

Aegypt - Vocation

"How was it that he had come to lose his vocation?

He couldn't turn back now, of course, and find where the thread had been dropped, and pick it up again; time was only one way, and all that he had learned he couldn't unlearn.  And yet.  He sat with Barr's book in his lap, and listened to the silent city, and felt an unreasoning grief:  something had been stolen from him, he had stolen something from himself, a pearl of great price, that he had forgotten the value of and had thrown away thoughtlessly, and now could never have again."

Aegypt
John Crowley