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

The Meeting 39
tain-climbing goods store, a chemical laboratory, a photo-engraving
shop. In each place I undertake the apparently impossible. I’m paid
badly, of course, I’m too old to bargain, but I own the patents to
whatever I invent. I must keep active, you see; it’s one way to
know who I am.”
“When I was about six,” I said, “I fell asleep in the bathroom
and dreamed I woke up dead, wondering who I’d been.”
“A case in point,” said Brillig.
He went over to the pile on the floor and pulled out a book that
had obviously been well-thumbed.
“This is Mount Analogue, by the French writer René Daumal,
whose untimely demise in 1944—gracious, he was only thirty-six,
my own age at the time—was a tragic loss to literature.”
Brillig read:
I can admit to you that I fear death. Not what we imagine about
death, for such fear is itself imaginary. And not my death as it will be
set down with a date in the public records. But that death I suffer
every moment, the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my
childhood, keeps questioning me as it does you: “Who am I” Everything
in and around us seems to conspire to strangle it once and for
all. Whenever that voice is silent—and it doesn’t speak often—I’m
an empty body, a perambulating carcass. I’m afraid that one day it
will fall silent, or that it will speak too late. 44
“We all wonder in the early years,” said Brillig, “but you know
how it is; as we grow older we lose touch with the inner life. Overwhelmed
by practical matters and the opinions of others, we forget
the mystery. Just as in your dream, we might, any of us, wake up to
find ourselves dead.”
He gently closed the book and lowered his eyes.
Rachel was quite moved. So was I.
“Do you still do analysis?” asked Arnold.
“No one since—.” Brillig nodded at Norman. “Not my greatest
success, I’m afraid.” He laughed uproariously. “Ah well, I think we
get along.”
Norman smiled. I gathered this was a private joke.
44 Mount Analogue, p. 35.