His Death Has Become Another Tragic Experience For Me.

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His death has become another tragic experience for me.

[Carl Jung: As I have so earnestly shared in his (Victor White) life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me.]

To C. K. Ginsberg

Dear Mrs. Ginsberg, 3 June 1960

Thank you for kindly telling me the news of Father White’s end.

It forms a valuable supplement to the thoughts that have moved me from the moment when I saw that we had come to the parting of
the ways.

I was at the end of my resources and had to leave him nolens volens to the decree of his fate.

I saw that his arguments were valid for him and allowed of no other development.

I accepted this in silence, for one can only respect such reasons even though one is convinced that-had the circumstances been favourable-one might yet have reached out beyond them.

In such cases I usually tell my patients: here only fate can decide.

For me personally it is, every time, a matter of life and death, where only the person concerned can speak the word.

For it depends entirely on him and his decision what will
Happen.

Knowing how much depended on whether Father White could understand my arguments or not, I still tried to point out the difficulties in my second-last letter to him.

With the feeling, however, that it would not be granted me to pierce through to his understanding.

It was then that I sinned against my better insight, but at least it served as a pretext for my asking his forgiveness and offering him a touch of human feeling in the hope that this would afford him some small relief.

As I have so earnestly shared in his life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me.

To us limits are set which we cannot overstep, not in our time.

Perhaps what has evolved in the course of the centuries will not cease to be active for just as long a span.

It may take many hundreds of years for certain insights to mature.

I am glad and grateful that you looked after him so kindly.

It was always my fear that he would have to spend his last days in the professional chill of a hospital or in the atmosphere of a monastery cell.

Thank God that was spared him.

One must also be grateful for the merciful intervention of the embolism.

I thank yo u for your kind offer to let me see the drawings.

I hope you will understand th at I prefer to let the images of the living man steadfastly gazing ahead live on in my memory.

In gratitude,

Yours sincerely,