Now spinning: the Abyssinian Baptist Choir led by Professor Alex Bradford. Liner notes by no less than Langston Hughes.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.300

We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives experience a glamor which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.

And then, as if to prevent me from getting too carried away in my praise of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, comes the travel chapter. I think Jung was really trying to learn from non-Europeans but there’s way too much talk about savages to make for comfortable reading.

Purchased for the car. I can’t tell if I’m getting wiser or crazier as the days go by.

Finally getting some rain! It’s been about a month since our last significant rainfall. Hopefully it will last for a while today.

Today I learned that “archeology” is an alternate spelling for “archaeology.” And the strange thing is that one website says the former is the American spelling while the latter is the British. As far as I can recall, I have never seen the former spelling used until today. What about you?

Xenophobia plus bad grammar

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.235:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. … Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

I could read Memories, Dreams, Reflections all day long. It’s a book full of mysterious visions and dreams from a person who is among the deepest minds of the last few centuries—yet it is completely readable.

Thanks to @readerjohn for passing on this article about an 80-ton limestone carving of Washington crossing the Delaware. Turns out it was a project initiated in 1974 by Merle Edington, a member of my hometown’s Chamber of Commerce. The carver was Frank Arena, who was retired and 76 years old at the time. Click through the link above for a picture.

More about Frank Arena: He was born in Brooklyn and moved to Bedford with his Italian immigrant father Frank Sr. One of Frank Jr’s first jobs was to help his father carve the columns of Bedford’s Masonic Temple:

Frank died in 2001 at age 102, having lived across three centuries. His grave is marked by a monument topped by a hat. “Whenever you saw him, he had that hat on. He carved stone in it. He went to church in it. He was always in that hat,” recalls Gene Abel (no known relation), the caretaker of Green Hill Cemetery.