tags: 📥️/🔖️/🟥️ publish: true aliases: - Iron John cover: '' general_subject: specific_subject: source: manual isbn: doi: url: author: "[[@Robert Bly]]" guest: publish_date: reviewed_date: ---  ## Highlights - Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity Unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive (Page 1) - A contemporary man often assumes that a woman knows more about a relationship than he does, allows a woman's moods to run the house, assumes that when she attacks him, she is doing it "for his own good." (Page 101) - I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every moment holy (Page 138) - That scene already took place when I was twelve or so. When I was twenty-eight I still had the longing for purity, "to be above it all," not to be involved. Marie-Louise von Franz concluded from her experience with these heavenly flyers or flying splinters that they choose ascent as a revolt against maternal earthiness and female conservatism. They fly upward, she believes, out of fear of the magnets that she says some women hide in the ground in the hope of luring light-headed men down to the ground of marriages, jobs, and long-range commitment. The evolution of the boy into a birdlike creature is a natural culture movement; he looks up at the light when he wants to escape, as do forman birds. Imprisoned birds flutter up the wall toward any cracks of light.. So the young ascenders often find themselves achieving spirit, but at the expense of life or their own grounding in masculine life.