On the shoulders of giants

After talking about symbology so much, I decided to get off my duff and check out a Joseph Campbell book. I went with his series The Masks of God, beginning with the first book, Primitive Mythology. I've only read a few pages so far, but I can tell I'm going to be reading the whole series.

A lot of what I've been talking about in previous entries ("Evolution of Symbols" and "Les éléphants et les acrobates") is, of course, touched on by Campbell and with a greater degree of breadth and depth than I could ever hope to achieve. I was amazed to see that he even talked about the baby bird running from the hawk's silhouette (though he takes the analogy much further).

My one regret about this whole deal is that, now, it's going to be harder to forge new territory on the subject. Anything I write is going to be influenced by Joseph Campbell. It reminds me of the Orson Scott Card novelle, Unaccompanied Sonata, where the main character, Christian, is taken away from his parents as a baby because he's a musical genius. He's raised in the woods away from all civilization and all music, so that any music he (spontaneously) composes on his keyboard is completely original. Eventually, a man slips him a tape of Bach and he listens to it in secret, but then is petrified that his captors will learn that he's been "compromised," so he ends up never playing sonatas which, ultimately, causes them to realize what's happened.

I know that in so many ways we can never hope to do anything originally. Everything we ever hope to accomplish is building on what other people have done. In fact, most of our modern movies are based on basic motifs which can be traced back to the Greeks, but I suppose that's because there are only so many conflict motifs: man vs. nature, man vs. man, man vs. self, etc. I don't think that should detract from our accomplishments. Sir Isaac Newton remarked, "[I]f I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."