GATHERING FLOWERS
'Anthology': from ancient Greek, literally: 'a flower gathering' In the eyes of many book lovers I am guilty of the terrible crime of turning down corners of pages and scoring paragraphs with my thumbnail when I come across something that strikes me as being important, because I find this by far the best way of relocating it later. Many of the books on my library shelves have suffered in this way but three have had a particularly hard time as I have read them several times. One is Carl Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, another, his book entitled Man and His Symbols, and the third is van der Post's book about the great man himself entitled, Jung and the Story of Our Time. Because these books have meant so much to me and have helped guide me over the last three decades in my effort to create my Symbolic Sculptures, I have gone through the three volumes and copied out a few of the paragraphs marked over the years. NB: The flower photographs are all from Margie's rose garden.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Gustav Jung
1. The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by the fact long ago as a young medical student, and it seems to me that I should have been prematurely annihilated. Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its underground rootstock. It's true that life is invisible, hidden in the root. The part that appears above ground lasts only a summer. Then it withers away - a short-lived apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and 1303