"What had happened to that great dreaming process I discovered then in me and others? What of the ladder, phosphorescent between a star-packed heaven and stony waste-land earth, charged with angelic messengers ascending and descending it? When I looked around me it was not only as if the dream had vanished in the debris of war and disaster behind me, and the ladder between men and their greatest value removed, but that they had lost their capacity to dream. ... I knew that somehow the world had to be set dreaming again...." (p.36)

"[Jung] was already deep in conversation with a distinguished professor when I was shown to my place at his side. They were, I remember distinctly, talking about primitive ways of making fire, and I thought how strange that one should begin such a meeting at a real beginning, not an arbitrary point of departure but the position for a natural leap forward into what came first perhaps in human awareness." (p.38-39)

The pages in which Van der Post describes his first day in Jung's company communicate more of Jung as a man than the whole of several biographies I've read, and are well worth the price of the book. Jung was in his 70s when van der Post met him in Zurich.

"That laugh of his was one of the more memorable events of that afternoon, as far as I was concerned. It was both Olympian and intensely human at the same time. It came out of that big man sheer and immediate, with no inhibition at all between the impulse to laugh and the laughter itself. ... his laugh on that sombre and sombring autumn afternoon settled it, all the more because it affirmed that the continuity had not been broken between it and the first laugh of an authentic child of life, laughing because the policeman who for him represented the desert in the human spirit which the grown-up world creates and calls law and order, had been brought low in the common dust by a mere banana peel." (p.43, 44)

"There is a kind of conversation I have hardly ever experienced except in Africa, when one is alone in the bush or desert with the minimum of civilised contrivances to diminish the impact on one of that great swollen sea of land, its skies, winds, and clouds, and abundance of vivid and infinitely diversified natural life. Its subjects come up fast in one's senses like a dawn of thunder when over and above the voices of one's African companions, as a rule pitched singularly low out of the instinctive reverence induced by that natural surround standing like a vast cathedral over them, one overhears one's first intimate conversation of nature - the voice of the lion, the passionately intense cough of a leopard, the sound like pistol shot of an elephant tearing a strip of his favourite relish of bark from a tree, the night-plover's sea-pipe call, the bush-buck barking to keep its courage up, a baboon whimpering in some unfathomable nightmare of the tangled bush, the croaking of frogs by some precious star-filled water and the sustained Gregorian chanting of the cricket priests of the night, and overall the smell of the incense of the devout earth evoked by the first fall of dew.... And yet on this occasion... I had a most extraordinary feeling that he and I were only technically there [in his library], and in reality were back in Africa in the way I have just described." (p.46, 47)

"I have always had a hunch that [coincidences] are a manifestation of a law of life of which we are inadequately aware and which in terms of our short life are unfortunately incapable of total definition, and yet however partial the meaning we can extract from them, we ignore it, I believe, at our peril. For as well as promoting some cosmic law, coincidences, I suspect, are some sort of indication to what extent the evolution of our lives is obedient or not obedient to the symmetry of the universe." (p.47)

"In any case, [Jung] emphasised over and over again, only the most naïve of attitudes assumed that the analytical process was aimed at resolving the problems of life. In essence life was problematical and men derived their purpose from living it as if in answer to the problem it posed. 'I myself,' he told me once, 'have never encountered a difficulty that was not truly the difficulty of myself.'" (p.132)

"The true meaning of Christ for [Jung] was that every individual should live out fully his own natural and specific self as truly as Christ had lived his unto the end to which he had been born, and this was only possible if man were reintegrated with the shadow over all in the despised and rejected aspects of himself and his time through intercession of the universal feminine in himself." (p.240)

"It is not surprising that having come to terms with the reality of the shadow not only in himself, his own time, but in the pattern of God, Jung felt more free than ever not to do so much as to be utterly within himself all that he had discovered and wanted life to become." (p.248)

"That was [Jung's] greatness: being so human, with all the human capacity for error and distraction, he yet did so much with his fallible spirit that is everlasting." (p.256)

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