At the moment I am reading through Volume 2 of Joseph Campbell's "Masks of God" series, "Oriental Mythology". Typical of many ebooks, the whole text is plagued by typo's. We have "got" for "goat", we have "gin" for "gain", these among many others, and the whole book seems unable to distinguish between "form" and "from". Quite amusing at times and sometimes the whole context of a passage is lost or changed. That aside, the text is constantly engrossing.
At one point Joseph Campbell quotes Ananda K Coomaraswarmy who is speaking about Art and the difference between the Occidental and Oriental forms:-
Where European art naturally depicts a moment of time, an arrested action or an effect of light, Oriental art represents a continuous condition.
Or so Mr Coomaraswarmy has it and he may well be right. I tend to shy away from any definitive attempt to differentiate between "east" and "west", but maybe he has a point.
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| Manet catches a moment of time, "an effect of light" |
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| "A continuous condition"? |
What this made me think of, in my rambling wandering fashion, was a long gone quote of another, who spoke of our lives being one long sequence of "anticipations and epitaphs", never resting in the moment where, according to T S Eliot, we "are the music while the music lasts", the "still point of the turning world".
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| "We are the music while the music lasts" |
Anticipations and epitaphs? I find this true and sometimes I am sceptical of the hip voice of some who drone on about "living in the moment". Allowing myself to be judgemental, such people often give evidence that they actually do anything but, many living in anticipation of the next puff of weed that will transport them to Never Never Land. Eliot himself speaks of a "condition of complete simplicity costing not less that everything". There is a price.
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| A condition of complete simplicity |
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