Myth and Magic

Well, The Magus officially took over my life for about the past five days or week or something. I couldn't put it down, which is probably why I've been feeling so stressed in other areas lately. It was totally worth the pain, though. I got the whole way through as of yesterday at lunch--just for the first time, as I'm sure I'll read it at least once more in the near future. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, so I'll try to be as vague as possible with my remarks at this point.

The very setting of The Magus is mythical. A remote island in Greece? What better place to set a modern myth? It really is about everything, and therein lies a great part of its magic. I tried to summarize it to myself after I'd finished reading it and found that I couldn't satisfactorily fit the whole book into the usual one-sentence Library of Congress-style synopsis. Even as I sit here almost 24 hours later, my mind is still boggling at how incredibly huge the story is, though it's only from the point of view of one person. Some might call that focus narrow, but such a critique misses the significance and power of the story. That one man's story has the weight of thousands of years of myth and magic and tradition and humanity and reality. Words fail; I feel as if I'm trying to draw a magnificent sunset-washed vista with a blunt brown half-crayon that a two-year-old has chewed on.

For some reason, I keep coming back to Eliot, specifically line thirteen of Burnt Norton V. "And all is always now." I think when I read, I experience a little of what Eliot was talking about. There is no concept of time when I'm reading a good book; just the story, just the "now" of imagination. Nothing else matters for a while, until I realize I'm going to be late to class and I reluctantly have to put away the book and start to ooze my way back into the quagmire of day-to-day life. But the book yet lives in my mind, still a tiny island of "now" amidst an ocean of "presently."