Yesterday morning I shook the dust of America from my feet,
Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse: North German Lloyd; BREMEN September 22, 1909
. . . Yesterday morning I shook the dust o America from my feet, with a light heart and an aching head, for the Y/s plied us with wonderful champagne. . . . As far as abstinence goes, I’ve arrived on very shaky ground indeed, in point of principle, so that I am honorably withdrawing from my various teetotal societies. I confess myself an
honest sinner and only hope that I can endure the sight of a glass of wine without emotion an undrunk glass, of course.
That is always so; only the forbidden attracts. I think I must not forbid myself too much. . . .
Well, then, at ten o’clock yesterday morning we sailed, to our left the towering whitish and reddish heaven-storming towers of New
York City, to our right the smoking chimneys, docks, etc., of Hoboken.
The morning was misty; New York soon disappeared, and before long the big swells of the ocean began.
At the fire ship we dropped the American pilot and then sailed on out “into the mournful wasteland of the sea.”
It is, as always, of cosmic grandeur and simplicity, compelling silence; for what has man to say here, especially at night when the ocean is alone with the starry sky?
One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance, and many old sayings and images scurry through the mind; a low voice says something about the ageoldness and infinitude of the “far-swelling, murmurous sea,” of “the waves of the sea and of love,” of Leukothea, the lovely goddess who appears in the foam of the seething waves to travel-weary gives him the pearly veil which saves him from Poseidon’s storm.
The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over.
The beauty and grandeur of the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful bottomlands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create ourselves in the animation of the “mournful wasteland of the sea.”
Now we are still worn out from the “torment of these last days.”
We brood over the past few months, and the unconscious has a lot of work to do, putting in order all the things America has churned up within us. … ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 369.
