The Cry for Myth

MYTH AND MEMORY Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some event occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day – and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations. The myth does not tell us much about the possessive patient’s literal history, but it does tell us a great deal about the person who does the remembering. For the person re-forms the event, shapes it, adds color here and a few details there; and then we have a revelation of this person and his or her attitude toward life. As Sartre would say, “The myth is a behavior of transcendence.” THE GREAT MYTH OF THE NEW LAND The loneliness is one expression of our rootlessness. Many people in our day, separated from tradition and often cast our by society, are alone with no myths to guide them, no unquestioned rites to welcome them into community, no sacraments to initiate them into the holy – and so there is rarely anything holy. The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuageable of all. Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hand as if in mid-air. We are like the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld, crying for news about the people up in the world but unable themselves to feel anything. INDIVIDUALISM AND OUR AGE OF NARCISSISM Americans cling to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages (except for hermits) and would have been considered psychotic in Classical Greece.