![]() ![]() ![]() You might say further: It’s the dream-poem of right now. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” first published in 1798, is-you might say-the archetypal archetypal journey. To be at sea, mid-story storm-threatened or becalmed to be adrift, disoriented, at the mercy of incomprehensibly avenging forces that somehow (and you know this, you know this) contain the secret of who you are … We’ve got a poem for that. If such a character exists in the coronavirus story, it is not an individual, but the entire modern world.” Wrapping up one of his recent panoramically authoritative surveys of our altered landscape, inner and outer, my Atlantic colleague Ed Yong put it like this: “In the classic hero’s journey-the archetypal plot structure of myths and movies-the protagonist reluctantly departs from normal life, enters the unknown, endures successive trials, and eventually returns home, having been transformed. ![]()
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