ORPHEUS REDUX
A Memoir
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downloadable at
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Orpheus_Redux_A_Memoir.html?id=rP5LEQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
This short book is offered as a third installment in John O’Meara’s series of memoirs, which began with Defending Her Son, 2000 and continued with The Bereaved Writer, 2008/2017.
Here the author brings forward more emphatically than ever the main mystical experience in his life out of which his work as a literary critic emerged: a personal experience of “the death of the beloved,” which at some point transforms into an encounter with the Anthroposophia Being. From this encounter, and from the author’s further separation from this Being, who is as if Herself returned to death like another Eurydice, from this and from all of his efforts to continue in the line of creative energy that opened up from this, his main critical work emerges spreading over some thirty years.
Reviving all this again, now from the end-point of his literary career, having reached the biographical stage that the great poet Yeats once described in relation to “the Limits of Ambition,” the author has begun to see how the whole pattern of his life and his work has unfolded along the very lines of the biographical model Yeats learned from his own ‘occult’ Masters.
What does this Orphic author’s looming death now forebode, in turn?
…looking at your mystical experiences in your life's journey: the correspondences with Yeats's 'A Vision' are, indeed, striking; concerning this book, Yeats wrote "Some may think me a crazed fanatic" (889), but your little book disproves this…
—R.W Desai, author of Yeats and Shakespeare
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On Defending Her Son
“An addictively spell-binding account”—J.D. Gravenor, The Montreal Gazette
On The Bereaved Writer
“A work of eloquence and merit.”—Gary Geddes, author of Sailing Home
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The author in Yeats country,
with Ben Bulben in the background