Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

Typology Revisited 33
were plenty. He brought people home at all hours of the day and
night. I liked privacy, my own quiet space. I was concerned to keep
to my timetable. During the day I escaped to my room and studied,
or pretended to. At night I lay in bed with a pillow over my head,
listening to them carouse.
On the other hand, Arnold’s way of functioning was sometimes
quite helpful. Like when we furnished the house.
Our landlady, Gretchen, took an immediate fancy to Arnold. God
knows why, he didn’t present as well as I did. “Just pick out what
you want,” she said. “You do the shopping, I’ll pay the bills.”
I had a few things in mind. So did Arnold. My ideas were quite
modest, Arnold’s were not. We already had beds and a few chairs.
“A nice comfortable sofa,” I said, as we entered the department
store. “A bookcase and a desk for each of us, a couple of lamps.
That’s all we need.”
“You have no imagination,” said Arnold, steering me to the antiques.
“You do the talking.”
Naturally. I had not come to Switzerland without learning some
German. Before leaving Canada I took a Berlitz course for six
months. I wasn’t fluent but I could make myself understood. I could
also get by in French. Arnold knew no French and could not even
count in German. I think he did not realize he was coming to a foreign
country. I scolded him about this more than once.
“A few phrases,” I implored. “Try saying hello, Guten Tag.”
“Aw,” he said, “they all speak English.”
As it turned out, they didn’t. Worse, and to my chagrin, the language
of the streets was Swiss German, a dialect, almost as different
from German as Welsh or Scottish is from English. I was just
about as helpless as Arnold.
Back to the department store. In one language or another, we
managed to spend a lot of our landlady’s money. While I fumbled
to say exactly what I meant, Arnold waved his hands and gesticulated.
By the time we left, ushered out by a grateful crowd of salespeople,
we had a few things I hadn’t thought of: a Chinese screen,