A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) French philosopher, essayist
Essay: Between Yes and No
“That’s been important to me for a while because I was doing years of apprenticeship, which I think is a noble thing for anybody in the creative world to do, helping bring Joe Campbell’s work to the forefront, Huston Smith, Alex Elliot, six films on American Indian issues, films on architecture. And then, in the late 1990s and early 2000, I came across this wonderful quote by Camus at the time when one of my publishers asked me to take the baton from Joe Campbell, Alex Elliot, and Mircea Eliade, all the great mythologists, and write an entire book on how myths are important and relevant and maybe even indispensable today. Hence my book Once and Future Myths. This quote by Camus helped me get there. I started to think my greatest loves today all have their beginning in my childhood, my love of myth, books, travel, art, beauty, and even baseball. It’s there in the very beginning. So, when I wrote a collection of my own travel stories, which is called The Book of Roads, this talk by Camus informs that entire book, because up into a point, I was a little reluctant to talk about childhood passions, boyhood passions, which then grow into adolescence. Sometimes we leave them behind for a while. Other times we go back to them. And that notion of your heart first opening is an image of a kind of blooming of the soul. I had to find a way to trust that, not be ashamed because now I’m an older guy, but realize there is a kind of continuity to our first loves. What we fell in love with early on can be that thread that ties together our entire life.”
Phil Cousineau, mythographer and
author of The Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus
