Ricorso
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The Return Home
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell cautions that "[t]he returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world". The challenge in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into human life, and then, ideally, figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. Campbell writes:
Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities, and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided.
Continue the Journey
A major theme in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is that completion of one journey presents an opportunity to begin another.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
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“In my end is my beginning.”