Carl Jung: You have paid a salutary tribute to the earth with your illness.

To Count Hermann Keyserling

Dear Count, 2 January 1928

Your return to yourself, enforced by illness, is on the right track and is something I have wished and expected for you.

You identify with the eternally creative, restless and ruthless god in yourself, therefore you see through everything personal-a tremendous fate which it would, be ridiculous either to praise or to censure!

I was compelled to respect Neitzsche's amor fati until I had my fill of it, then I built a little house, way out in the country near the mountains and carved an inscription on the wall: Philemonis sacrum-F austi poenitentia, and "disidentified" myself with the god.

I have never regretted this doubtless very unholy act.

By temperament I despise the "personal," any kind of "togetherness," but it is so strong a force, this whole crushing unspiritual 1eight of the earth, that I fear it.

It can rouse my body to revolt against the spirit, so that before reaching the zenith of my flight I fall back to earth.

That is the danger you too must reckon with.

It is also that fear that prevents our friend X. from flying.

He can be nothing else but intellectual.

You have paid a salutary tribute to the earth with your illness.

Let's hope your gods will be equally gracious to you next time!

With best wishes for the New Year,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 49-50