Steve Tills of* Black Spring* {click here}
promptly commented on our quotes from
Paul Zweig's classic book, *The Heresy of Self-Love:
A Study of Subviersive Individualism*.
In the preface to the second
(1980) edition, Zweig comments:
"While writing *The Heresy of Self-Love,*
I had spent several years tracing the curiously
persistent revivals of Narcissus in our cultural
traditions. Over and over again, he became the
figure of a powerful longing for inward
autonomy, a sort of spiritual Robinson Crusoe,
as in the fantastic poems of the
Gnostic sects which competed with early
Christianity; or else, a grim figure of
warning: a starved lover staring into
cold water; a woman gazing into a mirror....
Narcissus was the failure of love, the fray
in the social bond...The social effervescence
of the 1960's quickly faded, and the
vaunted revolution in personal style-what Charles
Reich called the 'greening of America-
have left behind the feeling of an
unsolved problem, which has fed cultural debate
in recent years. The galvanizing word of that debate is
'narcissism'..."