“Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors”
Jonathan Miller

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset

“An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor”
Robert Frost

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
Orson Scott Card

We love stories and we can’t do without them. The narrative is quite possibly the oldest thread in the fabric of humanity. We live out our own personal stories, we sing them, write them, dance them. We are all intimately acquainted with the poet, the bard, the playwright, the troubadour. We all have stories of our own that we clutch close to our hearts, handed down by generations, by word of mouth, through dried ink on yellowing pages, through high-definition earphones and on brightly lit screens.

The oldest and most powerful story is that of the hero. The Epic Of Gilgamesh. The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and the Journey To The West. The Mahabarata and Ramayana. Homer’s Odyssey. King Arthur. Hugo’s Les Miserables. Joyce’s Ulysses. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Dicken’s Great Expectations. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. The Legend Of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Sometimes there are stories that are written with an “anti-hero”, and sometimes there are stories written about places and spaces without any importance given to the development of any individual character- in these stories I can’t help but feel that the setting itself is the lead character, or hero, in a sense. Regardless, I think it is safe to say that there must be something about all these stories, these bildungsromans that compel us so.

We are all heroes. In some way or another. In the simplest and most basic sense, we are the protagonists of our own personal narratives. But we can be more than that. We do not write our stories as individuals, but as communities, as collectives, as a species. We can be heroes to our loved ones and immediate communities just by living well- as John Lennon said, “A working class hero is something to be.” The more exceptional amongst us go on to become heroes in our collective narratives- to sculpt history, to move the world.

It is my personal desire to study and understand the journey of the hero. I want to study it, dissect it, break it down, compare it and contrast it against itself across cultures and contexts, and out of all that precipitate insight and knowledge. You could look at it as philosophical inquiry, a study on how life ought to be lived. At the end of all this (consider the Pareto Principle, as usual, for there will never actually be an end) I’d like to put together a tome of knowledge on “The Art Of Heroism”, which I will have to define, explore, all of that fun stuff. I hope to share this information with everyone, so that everybody can learn to be a hero rather than an NPC. Heroes are made, not born. (Well- the context in which you are born and raised plays a large role in your personal growth, but let’s not worry too much about that at this juncture.) In the long run, I hope to build an army of Heroes- people who I will loosely define pursue and embody the skills, virtues, vision and power of all sorts of legends- be they mythical, fictional, historical or working-class- who will work together and separately to impact the world positively as they see fit. I will, of course, adjust this definition as I trudge along. First I will have to define my own journey and develop as an individual myself, before I can try to get others to do the same.