ABSTRACT
This is a work about enchantment. Enchantment, today, is something we lack, something which even children miss out on, and it is in fact being extirpated from childhood by the aggressive and domineering mass-culture industries. Not just children and young people lack enchantment: so do adults. Enchantment, however, is something that the soul cannot do without, unless it is to starve. In “first-world” countries we are rich in every conceivable way, except the way of the soul, which is what this book is about. One in five people suffers mental illness in the land of plenty; but, in places where one might expect people to snap under real hardship and hopelessness, we find mental illness scarce, mental and physical obesity non-existent, and that, incredible to us, people are relatively cheerful. To the soul-starved westerner, this seems the wrong way round. A book cannot even hope to redress a cultural situation so far gone, and, anyhow, the situation is so complex that it is all but impossible to diagnose in any authoritative way. However, I am impelled to talk about enchantment.
