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

58 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
He struck a stance that I imagined dated back to his earlier days
in a classroom.
“Gentlemen, Ms. Rachel,” he said, “we all know there are many
ways to look at the story of Chicken Little. On occasion I have
fleshed these out, as has our friend here”—smiling at me—“but
what is the central point, the nub, as they say?”
My brain was still somewhat addled from our earlier tête-à-tête;
I couldn’t come up with anything. Rachel shook her head.
After some moments Arnold spoke.
“That it’s apocryphal?”
I looked daggers at Arnold, but Brillig only laughed.
“Dear sir,” he said, “we live on one side of a mental curtain, in
an age where anything one cannot see, hear, touch or taste is more
or less apocryphal.”
Norman nodded. “A corollary of the Brillig Principle.” 59
Arnold made what seemed to me a petulant gesture. Brillig noticed
it right away.
“My friends,” he said, “excuse my little self-indulgence, I did
not mean to turn this into a guessing game. The fact is, Chicken
Little personifies that fear lurking in us all, namely that the jig is
up, we’ve had it.”
“She was certainly pessimistic,” noted Rachel.
“Dear lady, when gripped by the shadow of death, who can jump
for joy? Only the very young, who feel immortal, and those who
heed nothing. I call them closet Chicklers: they know the end is
coming but they refuse to acknowledge it. The rest of us are stuck
with the truth: we are mortal. Life is simply a prolonged stay of execution.
Whether it ends naturally or with a sudden, arbitrary swing
of the Scythe, one day we will be dust.
“As we know, it is the most natural thing in the world to project
this awareness outside; which is to say, rather than put our own
house in order, we imagine the world itself is coming to an end.
That, I believe, is essentially what Ms. Little did and it is what
regularly happens, especially when we lose someone close.”
No one gainsaid him.
59 See above, p. 37.