Posted By BillHeise on June 12, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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This is one of the first systematic works I ever read. I had bought the third volume, Occidental Mythology and Creative Mythology, when I was 17. When I got home I had a hard time reading it and I put it down. It wasn’t until many years later that I picked it up again. I had not realized that this work was part of a four volume set. I found that I needed to go back and start from the beginning.

Over the course of reading the first book, Primitive Mythology, I realized that the book was very dense; and I decided to outline it. Looking back at my notes on Primitive Mythology I find that I was not at first very systematic in reading Campbell’s systematic work. But over time I realized that I was missing things, and this made me more aware of the need to outline. I was not going to outline the first things that occurred to me as I read the contents of a page. I needed a systematic reading so that nothing would be lost. For, I reasoned, if I lost any of Campbell’s work by failing to read closely enough I would not have a hold on the systematic approach that Campbell was offering.

It took me over a year and a half to read Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God. Over the course of that year and a half I went from being what I call a “random reader,” one who cleans some of the knowledge from the page in an indiscriminate manner, to a “critical thinker,” which I define as someone who can organize knowledge in hierarchies. It was a lot of work to train myself to do this. I used to tie myself to the chair with a belt and I would only allow myself to get up once an hour for five minutes before strapping myself back and going to work again.

Even so, Joseph Campbell cemented my ability to read and a deeper level than most people read. And it made it possible for me to read works by Shakespeare and even Chaucer as easily as I could read a newspaper. I simply tied myself to a chair for a long enough period of time so that when I was done I had a completely organized view of the knowledge that Shakespeare or Chaucer was providing me. [Yeah, how exciting am I?] I even did this during the incredibly difficult two semesters of Old English, which I took because only it was reputed to be the hardest class in the department.

Now, as I’ve said before on this blog, Campbell’s works did not provide the answers to all of the questions that it raised. I was on this account that I went back to school after four years of studying on my own. This work continued to play a part in my life, not on account of its knowledge, which was useful, but on account of its systematic approach to knowledge.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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