Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

Typology Revisited 35
to me. I’m not tied to what I say. I can’t help it if you take everything
so damned literally.”
He went on: “Intuitions are like birds circling in my head. They
come and they go. I may not go with them, I never know, but I need
time to authenticate their flight.”
That was typical. I was prosaic, he was lyrical.
One morning I got up to find yet another pot boiled empty on a
hot burner. Arnold struggled out of bed, looking for his glasses.
“Have you seen my razor?” he called.
“God damn it!” I shouted, furious, grabbing an oven mitt, “one
day you’ll burn down the house, we’ll both be cinders. ‘Alas,’
they’ll say, scooping our remains into little jars to send back to our
loved ones, ‘they had such potential. Too bad one of them was such
a klutz!’ ”
Arnold shuffled into the kitchen as I threw the pot out the door.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “You made dinner last night for Cynthia, I
wasn’t even here.”
It was true. My face got red. My balloon had been pricked. Reality
as I knew it just got bigger.
“I forgot,” I said meekly.
Arnold clapped his hands and danced around the room. “Join the
human race!” he sang. As usual, he couldn’t hold a note.
Only then did I realize that Arnold was my shadow. This was a
revelation. It shouldn’t have been, since we had already established
that our complexes were radically different, but it struck me like a
thunderbolt. I said as much to Arnold.
“You goof,” he said. “You’re my shadow as well. That’s why
you drive me up the wall.”
We embraced.
All that was a long time ago. In the intervening years I’ve become
more like Arnold. And he, more like me. Not only can he tell
left from right now, he irons his tee-shirts and has learned to crochet.
He dresses impeccably and his attention to detail is often