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The reader comes away from Norman O. Brown's new book with a feeling of wonder at the interpretative power he develops in so brief a series of essays. The volume is a collection of papers, some of which have appeared elsewhere and others given as lectures or public addresses, spanning a period from the writing of Love's Body in the 1960s to 1990 and the fall of East European Communism.
Brown began as, and remains, a classicist who has brought to his subject matter first a Marxist (in Hermes the Thief), and then a Freudian, lens (in Life Against Death and Love's Body). With the first four essays of this book “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Speech at Columbia University in 1960; “Daphne, or Metamorphosis” (1966); “My Georgics: A Palinode in Praise of Work” ; and “Metamorphoses II: Actaeon” , he recalls us to the tradition before both Marx and Freud, the tradition of the mysteries and the poetical understanding of life.
The second essay, “Daphne, or Metamorphosis,” is a meditation on the nature of change. Daphne, of course, transforms herself into the laurel to avoid being raped by Apollo. But in so doing, Brown shows us, she opens our understanding to the process of metaphor.