What I've often found when talking about Joseph Campbell (or life-planning in general) is that people don't feel quite comfortable talking about "bliss." And I don't know exactly why that is. But it's important, because it's a giant blinking neon sign that's telling you exactly what to do, and it's never wrong.

This video should answer any questions you might have on the subject:

There's an excellent project going on over at Shadowplay -- "Euphoria," it's called, and although different people will respond to different clips, you get the idea.

In fact, it's important that if a clip doesn't evoke something in you, you come to terms with the idea that maybe it never will. "You can't wear another man's hat," says Joseph. "What you have to do is translate the myth into its eloquence, not just into the literacy." That clip from The Fisher King isn't about berets and earflaps.

Joseph mentions Heinrich Zimmer here ("my old mentor," he calls him, though they only knew each other for a year). H.Z. used to say "the best things can't be told," they're simply beyond words; the second-best are metaphors and signposts and invariably misunderstood; and the third-best are facts and figures. The only kind of thing that you can really understand is the fourth kind, the last kind: plain old conversation, which employs type #3 to create type #2 in an attempt to evoke type #1.

I'll summarize a brief story that Joseph tells at this point in the book, and then we're finally done with the introduction and can move into the exciting first chapter.

In La Queste del Saint Graal, a 13th-century Arthurian romance, the knights all propose to obtain the Holy Grail. But it would be a disgrace to ride out together; and so each of them, one by one, enters the unexplored forest of his own choosing, without regard to boundary or pathway.

It's ultimately futile to walk in someone else's footsteps (as I am attempting with this very journal); you must push your way through the underbrush in the direction from which only you can hear a song, because that song reveals itself only to you.