Friday, July 31, 2009

Moore enchants blogger with unifying theme

In a post yesterday, "Another Look, Another Life", a blogger writes about Thomas Moore's The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. The blogger begins with,
"Thomas Moore's writing has always fascinated me. He is a psychotherapist. He fascinates me as much by the perceptiveness of his insights as by the beauty of his prose. He writes like a poet, always sensitive to the nuances of his suggestive words and his vivid images The two are so inextricably mixed that one really does not know whether to admire more the one or the other.

Recently I began to read The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, which I bought in my last trip to America. It is a follow-up to his earlier best-seller Care of the Soul. Whilst in the earlier book, he deals with our interior life, in this later work, he takes a look at what is out there in the external world. He writes about such "ordinary" everyday things and experiences we find in the world of nature as water, trees, stones and how we can look at our homes, gardens, furniture, tiny decorations, politics, sex, dreams, art, music, "everyday" mythologies, shrines, tabernacles, rituals and finally various kinds of angels and, spirits. It is as varied and wide ranging as one can possibly hope. But one finds amongst such dazzling diversity a unifying theme: the theme of enchantment."
After presenting an understanding of Moore's approach, the post ends with,
"Moore asks us to discover the "extraordinary" in the most "ordinary" of objects, events and people, to be surprised, awed and "enchanted" by the "magic" in them, if only we care to look!

I must return to the book again and again, to be reminded, refreshed and restore and reinstate this lost ability to the place it truly deserves in my life."

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