Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

by William Irwin Thompson

Book Overview

In this book, William Irwin Thompson explores the nature of myth. Acknowledging the persuasive power of myth to create and inform culture, he weaves the human ability to create life with and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312805128
• ISBN13: 9780312805128
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Love it.

Very fascinating and readable. Since I am rather lacking in funds, I have decided to stop buying books for a while, but after reading most of this in the library, I decided that it was a worthy exception.

Tough but worth it

The immediate effect of reading William Irwin Thompson is at least twofold: first one lapses into stunned silence, and then one wants to dance -- embracing the wonder of the mythic universe we inhabit. In this work the author is concerned with edges -- the origin of consciousness, the beginning of language, the source of symbol and the reason why sexual reproduction supplanted simple cell division. Such edges are necessarily the limits of our intellectual understanding, beyond them we can only see through myth. Thompson's scholarship is broad and deep and infused with keen insight. He ably demonstrates that science may be clever at dissecting what is, but fails when it attempts to demonstrate how things came to be. Though the scientist frames explanations in different language than the mystic, at the margins science lapses into pipe dreams. Take the case of explaining why humans developed large brains. A scientific explanation usually runs thus: as changing climate shrank the forests, some hominids moved into the savannah where standing upright was advantageous, which freed the hands to carry things, which freed the mouth from carrying things, which begat hand tools and language, which required more brain power, and the combination of bigger brain and language conferred evolutionary advantage. Great, but then how do you explain baboons? They made the same moves and survived just fine. So the science which seems to offer an explanation, only begs the question by describing a possible scenario. Tackling pedagogy from another angle, Thompson reasons that the long-held belief that men invented language as an organizing method for hunting and weapon making is similarly misguided. Women with babies were far more likely to engage in the invention, play and repetition necessary to formation of language. Developmentally, children are in the best position to learn to communicate before they are saddled with adult responsibilities. And women, as gatherers, were more likely to develop a taxonomy, creating the body of knowledge which identified plants by their utility or toxicity. Specific identity is much less important to a hunter than to a gatherer, and wolves manage to organize hunts quite handily without complex conversation. The author's exploration of sexuality as an organizing principle is equally divergent, and he looks to Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees for clues about the shift we made away from the matter-of-fact mating observed in other apes to the high urgency of sexual relations in humans. He notes in passing that moralists have often labelled our sexual attractions as an animal instinct, an idea that is exactly wrong. Non-procreative sex is almost exclusively a human trait, and Thompson explores its link to the rise of culture as well as the mythological roots of pornography, homosexuality, bestiality, and sado-masochism. Thompson's point is that ancient myths, preserved from times closer to the edges are likely to

Remarkable in Every Way

A friend of mine handed me a copy of this book a couple of years ago and said, "This is probably the most important book of the new century." Actually, it had been written almost a quarter of a century before I held it in my hands. It is remarkable in every way. I came late to William Irwin Thompson, sorry to say. But now that I know his work, I feel deeply enriched. His insight is huge, his vision sweeping. Reading this book, I was reminded of works like Love's Body. This is a rewarding reading experience, undimmed by time...because it was prescient when it was written. Joseph Dispenza is the author of "God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion."

re-imagining our past

Thompson is so dazzling a writer that, even when you don't agree with some of his conclusions, you are nevertheless thrilled to be taken along for this intellectual joyride through prehistory and myth; half the fun is the argument that this book will most assuredly start. New Age mystic or not, Thompson will forever change the way you perceive your world in challenging many things you have previously taken for granted: patriarchy, sexuality, gender and identity, and religion. Literate, passionate, and eccentric--this is one of my favorite books.

Above average "new age" stuff

Thompson takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the origins of culture, sex, agriculture and patriarchy.He does not solely rely on left brain abstract thinking, but has got the right side of the brain working too.In other words, he is into mythopoeic thinking, which gets down to deeper levels of existence.If for nothing else, this book is worth it for the sentence "Myth is the history of the soul."There is much wisdom in this sentence.Thompson has more insightful things to say about myth than many other writers on the subject.If he has a fault, it is a too wide sweep over his subject matter.Nevertheless, he has many challenging ideas to confront us with.