Название: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Автор: Карл Густав Юнг
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007381630
isbn:
“Spirit,” of course, meant for me something ineffable, but at bottom I did not regard it as essentially different from very rarefied air. What the roots absorbed and transmitted to the copper trunk was a kind of spiritual essence which became visible down in the cellar as finished gold coins. This was certainly no mere conjuring trick, but a venerable and vitally important secret of nature which had come to me I know not how and which I had to conceal not only from the council of elders but, in a sense, also from myself.
My long, boring walk to and from school began to shorten most delightfully. Scarcely was I out of the schoolhouse than I was already in the castle, where structural alterations were in progress, council sessions were being held, evildoers sentenced, disputes arbitrated, cannon fired. The schooner’s decks were cleared, the sails rigged, and the vessel steered carefully out of the harbour before a gentle breeze, and then, as it emerged from behind the rock, tacked into a stiff nor’wester. Suddenly I found myself on my doorstep, as though only a few minutes had passed. I stepped out of my fantasy as out of a carriage which had effortlessly driven me home. This highly enjoyable occupation lasted for several months before I got sick of it. Then I found the fantasy silly and ridiculous. Instead of day-dreaming I began building castles and artfully fortified emplacements out of small stones, using mud as mortar — the fortress of Hüningen, which at that time was still intact, serving me as a model. I studied all the available fortification plans of Vauban, and was soon familiar with all the technicalities. From Vauban I turned to modern methods of fortification, and tried with my limited means to build models of all the different types. This preoccupied me in my leisure hours for more than two years, during which time my leanings towards nature study and concrete things steadily increased, at the cost of No. 2.
As long as I knew so little about real things, there was no point, I thought, in thinking about them. Anyone could have fantasies, but real knowledge was another matter. My parents allowed me to take out a subscription for a scientific periodical, which I read with passionate interest. I hunted and collected all the fossils to be found in our Jura mountains, and all the obtainable minerals, also insects and the bones of mammoths and men — mammoth bones from gravel pits in the Rhineland plain, human bones from a mass grave near Hüningen, dating from 1811. Plants interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and flowering — a hidden, secret meaning, one of God’s thoughts. They were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was interesting, but it was not the essential thing. Yet I could not explain to myself what this essential thing was. How were plants related to the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example? This was something I could not fathom. They obviously partook of the divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb. By way of contrast, insects were denatured plants — flowers and fruits which had presumed to crawl about on legs or stilts and to fly around with wings like the petals of blossoms, and busied themselves preying on plants. Because of this unlawful activity they were condemned to mass executions, June bugs and caterpillars being the especial targets of such punitive expeditions. My “sympathy with all creatures” was strictly limited to warm-blooded animals. The only exceptions among the cold-blooded vertebrates were frogs and toads, because of their resemblance to human beings.
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