Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

36 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
The conversation ranged from painting to psychology to ethnology,
interspersed with philosophical reflections, snippets of arcane
Chickle Schtick and travel anecdotes. Brillig had spent some time
in his youth roaming the lower slopes of the world’s great mountains.
Rachel had toured Tibet for several weeks the year before.
Brillig said he knew it well. Norman and Arnold discovered with
glee that both had ancestors who’d lived in Wales.
Flushed with meat, fine drink and good company, I relaxed. My
apprehension vanished. The nature of the relationship between
Norman and Brillig was not immediately clear, though they were
obviously close in spite of the difference in age. At first I kept getting
flashbacks of Norman as I used to know him, but these were
soon blotted out by how well he carried himself. It turned out that
he had stayed in Zürich for only a few months.
“The lectures weren’t to my taste,” he said, somewhat apologetically,
“and I felt lost without German. But”—and here his eyes lit
up—”I was very taken with the Niederdorf.” 42
He had returned and gone back to school to study photography.
For the past few years he had made a good living working freelance.
I gathered he had met Brillig while on assignment for the
National Geographic.
On the whole, Norman held his own on practical issues, but otherwise
was deferential to Brillig. I didn’t wonder why. Adam Brillig
took my breath away. It was clearly his evening.
There was evident in Brillig’s manner of thinking, as in his outward
appearance, a singular combination of self-contained maturity
and the openness of a child. His mind was a force as palpable as
heat or light or wind. This was manifested in an exceptional faculty
for seeing ideas as external objects—and vice versa—and for establishing
striking connections between concepts which to me appeared
totally unrelated. One moment he treated human history as a
logical progression akin to a problem in quantum mechanics; in the
next breath he expounded on the method of divination using
chicken entrails, and convincingly linked this with the essentially
religious search for meaning.
42 The “lower town” area in the center of Zürich, known for its night life.