Carl Jung: I console myself with the thought that only a fool expects wisdom.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Alwine von Keller
Dear Frau von Keller, Bollingen, 2 January 1949
As I am in Bollingen and your letter came at a favorable hour, I can at last get down to answering you.
That at the end of the year one is disposed-and particularly in our well-advanced youth-to backward glances is not to be wondered at.
I too am in a retrospective phase and am occupying myself, for the first time in 25 years, thoroughly with myself, collecting my old dreams and putting them together.
There are all sorts of strange things among them. How little one still knows of the “unconscious”! (Blessed be this non-prejudice-evoking term!)
I would like to take this opportunity of drawing your attention to a book: The Various Light by Monica Redlich, London 1948.
The author is unknown to me but writes about things that are not unknown to me.
It will interest you.
If you don’t get this year’s Eranos-Jahrbuch I would like to send you my essay “On the Self” when the offprints come out.
My health has its ups and downs mostly because I still don’t really know what one can or cannot do when one will soon be 74.
My last illness was overwork.
I have to tell myself twice a day: not too much!
Snail’s pace and rests in between and a change of snail-horses.
Nevertheless I have succeeded in finishing a new paper on mandalas which is to appear this year.
I have regretted very much that I shan’t be able to come to this year’s [Eranos] meeting.
I must still look out for my liver.
I am like an old car with 250,000 km. on its back that still can’t shake off the memory of its 20 horsepower.
Nevertheless, I console myself with the thought that only a fool expects wisdom.
With every good wish for the New Year,
Yours ever,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 515-516.
