Our Daily Breach

Book excerpt: Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dickoffers both a way of understanding what has generally been called the greatest novel of the American myth while simultaneously exploring one’s own personal myth. Its added feature is that it is an interactive book in allowing reader’s to meditate on one question per page for each day of the year and to undercover many facets of one’s personal myth through cursive writing. It has been long understood that classics of literature are their own form of therapy in that they frequently tap into some of the most shared concerns of being human. This book makes such a connection between our interior life and the plot of the story through the power of mythopoiesis, namely the imaginative act of giving a formative shape to the myth we are each living in and out through the power of analogy, correspondence or accord with the classic poem. Using Melville’s epic of America, the reader may enter the deepest seas of his/her own mythic waters to realize and give language to the myth that resides in our daily plot line.