"Footprints" introduces life's double shadow, a force that both unifies and divides. Its shadow motif joins the mind's unifying "Fides" (trusting) mythos-of-memory with its flipside, the divisive "Phobos" (fearing) Logos-of-reason. The shadow brings art, love, intimacy, philosophy, education, and music. It unifies math and science even as it seduces vain mortals into "Either/Or" and "Us against Them" divisions and woke-fearing prohibitions-on-truth.
Volume IV (Chapters 26-32), describes the author's journey from surviving his forties to new awakenings in triumphal seventies. In grasping the Logos Paradox of Mythic Eden, life became the author's chemical reaction vessel, symbolizing the grand synthesis in which he began to live into a very personal odyssey in which two things―the university and the author― must coexist, if a higher dimension is to be served.
Academic chemistry departments, as bastions of the European Guild System of science from which they evolved, were founded in a double shadow of dis-connective Phobos reason incongruent with my own Mythos of unifying memory-plus-reason. The Guild's dualism long embedded in compartmentalization is now the defining quirk of modern society. This is self-inflicted wounding from man's fall in mythical Eden! In my holistic innocence I was not ready for the disconnect to boldly announce itself on my return to teach chemistry, 2016-2017, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. By the end of the class, it had become a successful process of 60 learners using their mind's own nature to re-cognize individual self in chemical structure and process. This was beyond rote absorption of facts and uncertitudes; but perhaps a portal to the meaning of existence.
