BOOK REVIEW: THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND IMAGES AND MEANINGS [PASCAL BENTOIU, “IMAGINE ȘI SENS” (“IMAGE AND MEANING)”, BUCHAREST: EIKON, 2023]

Abstract

It was only after I read the entire volume did I understand that the title Image and Meaning, which the author gives to his book, should also be accompanied by a subtitle – The Book of Revealed Mysteries. For me, this is the only way such a title can be deciphered. And understanding requires analogies. As many. At first, the thought took me to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the famous writing of Joseph Campbell, because there it is also about the images and meanings of a single reference, albeit a mythological and archetypal one. I wouldn’t have ruled out One Thousand and One Nights either, where Scheherazade acts narratively on Padishah Shahriar’s imagination, converting him to empathic humanity. Exactly as Rimsky-Korsakov presents the two in the first part of the famous symphonic suite. In a second sequence, I thought that in the case of music, the phrase image and meaning get a relevant analogy in the binomial form and content and further – structure and expression.