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

46 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
the world. Every morning at eight o’clock I go down to the post
office to see what comes back. So far it’s been a fair exchange.”
Brillig nodded, as if he already knew.
I added knives and spoons to the tray and led the way upstairs to
the sun room, Sunny at our heels.
We munched in silence, overlooking the garden, as dawn broke.
There was a slight sprinkling of snow on the deck. Ice had formed
on the plastic blanket covering the pool. The lone raccoon I called
the Garden Bandit crouched forlornly on the fence. Black squirrels
played hide-and-seek among the cedars. Two cardinals perched in
the maple. Sunny rested her nose on my foot.
Brillig began to speak of his past life.
“While still quite young,” he said, “I had already experienced
virtually every pleasure and disappointment, every happiness and
every suffering which can befall a man. I could give you chapter
and verse, but the details are tiresome to any but me and ultimately
of little consequence. The repertory of possible happenings in a
human life is fairly limited; it is enough to recognize the pattern.
Suffice to say that one day I found myself completely disaffected, a
victim of high living and what I thought of as the holy trinity of the
North American ethic: ambition, competition, success.
“I had entered the work force with an energetic zeal not uncommon
among my generation, added to which was a desire to lead a
meaningful and productive life. In short order I found that there
were precious few outlets for its fulfillment. In those days it was
child’s play to make a living. Anyone with a half decent education
could do it. For my part, I yearned for ‘something else,’ but I had
no idea what that might be. Is this, I asked myself, what turns men
into hermits, vagrants, sheltered academics, mystics, artists? Of
lucre there was no lack, it flowed like water from golden spigots,
but food for the soul was harder to come by.
“I quit the teaching post I held in a small town and journeyed to
the city. I was appalled to find it even worse. I’m sure you know
the opening lines of Rilke’s Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge:
‘People come here, then, to live? I should rather have thought they
came here to die.’ I took this as my credo. Never mind that Rilke
was a Dane in Paris and I was not. I too had been on the streets. I