THE RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND OF THE PUER AETERNUS PROBLEM
The term puer aeternus, “eternal youth,” is often used in psychology to denote a particular form of neurosis in men, which is characterized by a tendency to remain stuck fast in adolescence as a consequence of an overly strong mother attachment. Its chief hallmarks, therefore, as indicated by C. G. Jung’s remarks in his essay on the significance of the mother archetype, are homosexuality and Don Juanism. Both of these types of men show a weak emotional relationship with women of the same age.1 However, all other typical adolescent features can also be observed: the tendency toward adopting a highly provisory lifestyle, dreaming at the same time the fantasy of a “real” creative life, but undertaking very little to bring it about. Savior ideas usually play a major or minor role in this. These might take the form of a man’s thinking that he is a messiah who is going to save humanity, or at least that he is on the verge of being able to utter “the last word” in matters of philosophy, art, or politics. Reality as it is he experiences as unacceptable. The patience-exacting humdrum of everyday life as well as sustained efforts toward achievement are avoided, and everywhere—in the man’s profession, with the woman he lives with, with his colleagues—he finds a “hair in the soup,” as a result of which again and again a sudden and arbitrary breaking off of all relations can be observed. Usually, it is not only the speculative ideas and plans of the puer aeternus that are high-flying, but he often actually chooses aviation or mountain-climbing for his main sport. In this there is often a strong conscious or unconscious suicidal tendency at play, which leads to many accidents and crashes. Sometimes, however, the “winged youth” does not have an actual physical crash, but rather a psychic one in which, as part of a sudden crisis, he denies all his earlier ideals and then either dries up and plods along as a petit-bourgeois cynic or becomes a criminal and thus gives vent to his previously repressed realism in a kind of short-circuited form.
By and large, it appears at present that this form of neurosis is on the rise in our Western culture. The literary works of the well-known author Antoine de St. Exupéry reflect the French form of this problematic. The school of Stefan George and its admirers as well as many other in Germany, the “angry young men” in England, in Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, to mention only a few, belong in this category. The same thing holds true for America. The well-known psychologist Henry Murray in Boston has noted the enormous increase in the incidence of this puer aeternus problematic there and is working—I thank his assistant Dr. Greer for this information—on a major study of this problem. The artist George Rimmer or the poet John Maggee would be typical representatives of this type among the young people of America.
As long as we are only talking about individual cases, the problem can be explained and treated in connection with the personal mother attachment. But beyond this, the question now arises of where the collective increase in this neurotic constellation that we now seem to be faced with comes from. We know that the necessity and difficulty of disengagement from the mother represents a universal, one might even say “normal” problem, which is dealt with, for example, among all primitive peoples through male initiation ceremonies. The Protestant and Catholic confirmation ceremonies mutatis mutandis still evince weak vestiges of such initiations. In certain Italian towns, priests still give youths at their confirmation a hefty slap in place of the symbolic touch—a small remainder of ordeals of manhood. And in Switzerland, it is often at this time that the young man receives his first long pants and a watch—he leaves behind the dream of childhood and crosses over into time consciousness and manhood. The weakening of Christian faith that is more and more on the rise in many milieus could well be considered a contributory cause of this modern problem; for, after all, the Christian tradition is a patriarchally-spiritually oriented one and therefore represents a protective shield against the mother world and matter. However, this observation is not enough. We must penetrate more deeply into the background.
When we study the evidence of modern literature, which has left behind many typical examples of this psychic constellation, we see two archetypal images coming particularly strongly to the fore: a child god or divine boy or youth associated with light, on the one hand, and a strict, cynically hard father caught up in the psychology of power, a tyrant, or a boss, on the other. The latter is sometimes glorified in literature as an ideal leader of men, sometimes negatively represented as the enemy of “romantic youth.”
Goethe depicted this opposition in a moderated form confined to the personal level, that is, conceived in less archetypal terms, in the conflict between Torquato Tasso and Antonio. In Werther he pours out his own puer problem straight from the heart; and then in Tasso he goes so far as to reconcile the ingenious youth Tasso with the fatherly and responsible but all too realistic and prosaic Antonio: “Thus the sailor in the end holds fast / To the rocks against which he might have crashed!” This reconciliation happens in Goethe through the mediation of the feminine principle, that is, the anima.2
In more recent literature the same opposition appears in a far more archetypal form. The figure of the child god has perhaps been most purely portrayed—though not without an unpleasant sentimental-infantile tinge—in Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince. The little prince comes from the stars, because there he has had a falling out with his beloved, the rose. On earth he learns from a fox the first secrets of becoming a human being. But all the same he does not enter into close relationship with the earth; instead he is liberated from life by the wise serpent and its deadly bite and returns again to his star. The type of the antagonist is split in this little work into many different figures, all of whom embody the “grownups” who do not understand, whom St. Exupéry had already held up to derision in his introduction to The Little Prince. There is the money-counting merchant, the power-hungry king, the cynical and despondent sot, the quixotic lamplighter, and so on. The little prince from the stars does not take up contact with these figures but passes them by, untouched. In a certain sense, the serpent also represents a primary antagonist of the little prince. He is old, wise, hostile to life, and teaches the sweet suicidal temptation of freedom in death. In other works of St. Exupery’s, the boy’s antagonist is more clearly drawn, and one can see in these works that the writer is in quest of a positive relationship with these adversarial figures. Thus we have the airline boss and organizer Riviére in the novel Night Flight, who—strict, earnest, true to his duty, but hard—sends his “children,” the pilots, to their deaths; or the sheik in Citedelle, who rules in a paternally strict, responsible, and order-loving fashion, but who, for example, does not hesitate to condemn a woman to a gruesome death from thirst in the desert for a humanly understandable erotic transgression.
The image of the ideal leader-dictator or father of the country that dominates past and present political constellations is based, in my opinion, in part on a projected version of such an “antagonist” image.
In the dream series of a typical puer aeternus, characteristically, the Russian secret police, who want to torture the dreamer, appear as the embodiment of such a negatively perceived order-related paternal power figure. Functioning as the representative of this police power in the dream is an old woman, who hits the dreamer on the frontal sinus. The unresolved mother complex often contributes to the formation of a dictator ideal, for the mother attachment keeps the young man infantile, socially irresponsible, and disorderly, which then of course almost inevitably calls forth such a brutal counter-position as is represented here by the Russian secret police. This is surely also the case on a larger scale, politically.
A most vivid literary depiction, it seems to me, is the archetypal background of the puer aeternus problem in Bruno Goetz’s occult novel of 1919, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom without Space). C. G. Jung often mentioned this novel as a prophetic anticipation of National Socialism and also interpreted the destructive troops of boys that appear in it as a nefarious aspect of the puer or divine child.3 In this novel, the hero of the story, by the name of Melchior von Lindenhuis, comes between two hostile parties: that of the divine boy Fo ( = Buddha) and that of Herr Ulrich von Spät, who is pursuing him. Fo is accompanied by an ecstatic troop of boys who trigger upheavals and “liberational” mass eruptions of savagery in every city. Fo is a moon and water spirit, a son of the mother goddess Earth, who protects him in the form of an apple woman. Grapes, wine, Pan flutes, animals, roses, and fire are his elements. He proclaims an eternal change of forms through many rebirths, advocates abandoning oneself to life and death, seeking and wandering, dancing and ecstasy. His pursuer and enemy Ulrich von Spät (Spät in German means “late”), by contrast, is the ruler, with his “glass lords,” of a crystal-clear transcendental realm among the stars. Order, ethics, and pure spirituality are the goals he proclaims to humanity. For the most part Herr von Spät appears as a power-hungery sorcerer, but in his rare better moments, his face reveals itself as “the noble suffering face of a god.” On account of this nobler aspect, the hero of the novel, Melchior, can never completely abandon him, although his heart belongs more to Fo and the boys. Only at the end of the novel does his shadow help to kill the shadow of Ulrich von Spät, and then Melchior himself is united in death with the divine boy Fo, who appears to him surrounded by bunches of grapes. The latter recalls Goethe’s Euphorion in many respects and the boy guide in Faust, or Stefan George’s Maximin. Ulrich von Spät, on the other hand, could be compared to a figure like Klingsor in Wagner’s Parsifal. Herr von Spät represents, as it were, the mighty pressure of tradition and the past, which, as Jung once said, “buries the gods in marble and gold.” The boy Fo, by contrast, lies behind the National Socialistic excesses. We can really apply to him Rabelais’s remark that “La verité dans sa forme brute est plus fausse que le faux.”4 Since, in contrast to Goethe’s Tasso, here the weak anima figure cannot play the role of intermediary, in Bruno Goetz’s novel we find neither a transformation of the adversary nor reconciliation with him. But what does the opposition between this severe father figure and the winged boy god mean? Is this the problem that the philosopher Klages called “the spirit as the enemy of the soul”?
The most apt mythological analogues to these two contending figures are to be found in the symbolism of alchemy: the chief-dictator-father spirit corresponds there to the arcane substance known as the “old king”; whereas the puer aeternus seems to correspond to the mercurius infans or filius regius, which is also sometimes personified as a winged youth, juvenis alatus.
In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung gives a detailed commentary on the figure of the old king, who represents the arcane substance and is usually portrayed by the alchemists at the beginning of the process as defective, unredeemed, rigidified, sick, or even evil. The defective quality corresponds to an intensified egotism and hardening of the heart that must be broken down in the alchemical bath. Power hunger and concupiscence often also ingloriously characterize the old king. Similarly the boss, Riviére, in St. Exupery’s Night Flight and Ulrich von Spät in Goetz’s Reich ohne Raum embody a pure attitude of power and are characterized by a total lack of eros. The spirit, which in itself is no “adversary of the soul,” degenerates in such personfications to the level of intellect, and in this contracted and rigidified form stands in the way of all the psyche’s fertile and creative impulses. It is an enemy of emotionality and instinct, but precisely for this reason it secretly lets itself be negatively influenced by primitive impulses.
On the other hand, the puer aeternus, understood as an alchemical image, is, vis-ä-vis the old king, the element that is destined to replace him. This is a symbol of the renewal of life or the reunion of separated opposites, the “new inner man,” or the arcane substance resurrected, a more complete renewed symbol of the Self.
Seen in the light of alchemical symbolism and Jung’s remarks on the subject, the father image of the old ruler and the winged son are not only not real opposites but have a single nature. Therefore the alchemists referred to their substance as senex et puer. Christ was also called upon in the same terms, since he himself is the “Ancient of Days” who was reborn as a child through Mary. Through the fusion that takes place in the alchemical opus, whether in the fire or the bath, through dissolution into chaos or mutilation, in one way or another the old man is transformed into the son. Thus, when in modern variants father and son figures stand opposed, we can only conclude that something must have gone awry psychologically. Somehow or other the transformational process has gotten stuck.
However, in this regard Jung showed that the old king represents not only a tradition-bound, excessively egoistic, stick-in-the-mud principle of consciousness, but rather ultimately the collective God image itself. Therefore when it is said that the king is in need of transformation, it is ultimately our conception of the Divine that needs transforming, and it is clear that such a process is only possible within the psyche. In other words, the only thing we can do is orient ourselves toward the unconscious if we want to find out in what way our prevailing conscious dominants must change so that our image of the divine may once again be transformed, as Jung puts it, “into a real and workable whole, whereas before . . . [it] had only pretended to wholeness.”5
The archetypal image of the puer aeternus represents such an experience of the divine that renews the image of God. Now, if this whole process of the renewal of the king that Jung described and interpreted in detail in Mysterium Coniunctionis is not consciously realized, it seems simply to go on anyhow, but then in a negative fashion. Particularly interesting in this connection is the unfolding of events in The Little Prince. The boy from a star voluntarily permits himself to be killed by the serpent, a yellow sand viper, so as to be able to return to his star and the rose he has left behind there. Not too long after writing this, the author, St. Exupéry, himself followed the little prince into death. He was shot down by German pilots over the Mediterranean.
In alchemical symbolism, the serpent is identified with the filius regius, that is, with the star prince. The serpent is, as Jung says, “the lowest, most inchoate form” of the king in the process of renewal, “at first a deadly poison but later the alexipharmic [Counterpoison] itself.”6 The serpent represents the dark side of Mercury, a Hermes Katachthonios. It is said that when the light of a hero’s life is extinguished, he goes on living in the form of a serpent.7 In the life of St. Exupéry, the serpent actually took on its full deadly significance, as it always can whenever a person is identified with the archetype of the puer, because in this way he participates in the transformation of the archetype in concreto, and thus himself disappears into chaos, mutilation, and death. It is from this that the suicidal tendencies and proneness to death of human puer aeterni derive: the alchemical mortification of the arcane substance takes the form of their own personal death.
In this perspective, the mother complex that is coming to dominate modern society (I recall Philip Wylie’s book Generation of Vipers and its derision of “momism”) acquires a new significance. Attachment to the mother is conditioned by the fascinating power of attraction of the collective unconscious as the locus and matrix of the “renewal of the king.” The collective unconscious is the womb of the prima materia, the dark primeval state that the alchemists call “chaos,” the massa confusa in which the old man transforms into a youth. Women who no longer have a religious orientation and whose life has therefore become without content involuntarily identify themselves with this magic role of the Great Mother and then project the archetypal image of the hero or filius regius on their son—to the point of even preferring his death to the possibility that he might lead an ordinary human existence.8 Once a woman who was showing me the deathbed photograph of her drowned only son said to me verbatim: “I would rather have it this way than have him alive and have to give him away to another woman”!
The son, on the other hand, falls under the spell of the maternal principle because he is identified with the filius regius, and the filius regius is attracted with tremendous passionate force by the matrix of the unconscious, since ever and again this is what he transforms into. This is even more powerfully constellated in Protestant regions, since the archetypal mother image is missing from the religion. Thus either the entire power of fascination of this archetypal image falls upon the personal mother, or there develops such fear and alienation vis-ä-vis the feminine principle that the maculine consciousness closes itself off from all feminine influences and, with them, from the influence of the unconscious; in this way it withers into reasonableness and historical retrospection. In this way there arises the attitude of consciousness of Herr von Spät, that is, of the aging king who has withdrawn from the transformation process.
In Bruno Goetz’s Reich ohne Raum, von SpR appears as the childhood friend of the leading female character of the novel, Sophie (Melchior von Lindenhuis’s wife). Thus von Spät is also a personification of the animus in the woman. In this connection, I have often seen mothers using the argument of traditional “positive Christianity” against treatment of their sons, or wives using it against the Jungian analysis of their husbands; the secret motive behind their action was by no means Christian love but rather envy and lust for power. In other words, both the father and boss type—“Herr von Spät”—and the puer aetemus are archetypes that can also crop up as animus personifications in the female psyche. In an interesting work, Else Hoppe has explored the Typus des Mannes in der Dichtung der Frau (The Masculine Type in the Literary Works of Female Authors),9 and the opposition of puer and senex stood out clearly in the way women portrayed men in their writings.
I have often been asked about the psychology of the puella aeterna and if there is such a thing. Indubitably there is, as I see it. The puella aetema would be the “eternal daughter” type of woman, one who is unconsciously identified with the anima of the father. Such a woman lives, as does the young man of the puer type, in an archetypal role. She is a Kore, the numinous anima mundi, a goddess of light. The female type corresponding to Herr von Spät is the bitter, often scheming old woman who clings to tradition and hard-value possessions such as money, furniture, houses, fur coats—an old witch, incapable of love. Also the department-store hyenas that Philip Wylie so aptly portrays belong to this category. Greta Garbo definitely experienced the fall from the Kore role with particular intensity and least so I believe—survived as a human being. Grace Kelly also found a way out of the pure anima identification that her career forced on her. On the other hand, Brigitte Bardot, for example, continued to live the puella role in her films, which often indicates a hermaphroditic-boyish secondary nuance, since in alchemy the filius regius and his bride are secretly identical. Fashion, the film world, and the anima possession of men reinforce the temptation for women to play the puella role, just as the animus possession of mothers and women makes young men into “eternal youths.” At the same time, so much genuine spiritual, religious, and romantic longing and creative emotion is invested in this identification that it is understandable that those who have it do not want to give it up. After all, it appears to them that there is no other alternative beside the sterile tyranny of Herr von Spät or of the disillusioned old woman, because they do not know where and how an inner transformation of these figures might possibly occur.
In the spiritual revolution of Protestantism, a step was taken in the direction of no longer seeing religious images as external and of no longer assimilating the religious function of the psyche to the function of a visible church. But if one says A, one must also say B: if the images are no longer “outside” or to be found in a “dogmatic metaphysic,” then they must be in us—not in the subject, but in the objective psyche. Fully taking this necessary next step is what Protestantism did not dare; it is precisely at this point that the transformation of the “old king” stuck fast. If this next step had taken place, then a reconciliation of Protestantism with the introverted wing of the Catholic Church—that is, with its mystics—would have been conceivable. In this way a bridging of the schism through the eros principle and through the acknowledgment of the religious function of the unconscious would have been possible.
The reality of the unconscious psyche has for the most part been personified in mythology by the spirit in the nature of matter, by the mother, by the anima mundi, or by the “eternal feminine” in Goethe’s Faust. As this feminine power is not being acknowledged today in our Western culture, there has developed in its place, on the one hand, this increase in a highly regressive-seeming “momism” and in homosexuality, and on the other, a rigidification of consciousness that finds its immediate expression in an increase in the formation of police states. I have even been able to observe directly in individual cases how in dreams the image of the “old God” (in the case of the Germans, Wotan, in that of the Jews, Yahweh) and that of the police power or the dictator replace each other as motifs or else appear as identified, for the God image withdrawing from transformation, or the old consciousness dominant, does not merely remain as it is when the process fails to continue, but plainly regresses into old, primitive forms. Especially interesting for us today is the increasing importance everywhere in the outer world of secret police and spy networks. In their concealment they more or less directly embody the secret workings of the unconscious in an aspect that, on the one hand, is undermining and revolutionary, and on the other, is regressive and serves Herr von Spät. Without possessing any ideal goal of their own, these organizations serve to strengthen the power of the various dominating principles. In most cases their figurehead is material security, that is, the archetype of the mater materia is the principal motif that seduces them to action, either that or the conviction that strict “law and order” is necessary to keep down the chaos of the masses—in other words the boss-dictator or “old king” image. On the other hand, those possessed by the puer aeternus archetype are usually without political interests, and this goes to the point of social irresponsibility; they just get caught up in every exciting emotional mass movement that comes along, regardless of where it came from and where it is going. Of course, the two types of possession play into each other’s hands. Les extrêmes ne se touchent pas seulement;10 they are often even identical.
Even the rocket and flight attempts of the Eastern and Western groups can be seen in this light. Thus the American aviator-poet John Maggee writes about the ecstasy of his high flight in an open airplane that he “put out [his] hand and touched the face of God.” And touched the face of God! So God is still in the outer world somewhere in space or that is only a poetic metaphor—only attainable through outward-oriented aviational technology and acrobatics, not through searching within oneself. The ecstatic inflation that is associated with the experience of flight, is here incredibly naively spelled out. Soon after composing this poem, John Magee died in a plane accident. He, too, was bitten by the spirit of earth, the deadly aspect of the Mercurius, the serpent, just like the little prince from the stars.
It had already emerged from Goethe’s Tasso that the woman and the differentiation of the anima in the man play a crucial role in the transformation of the senex to the puer as well as in the integration of the whole problem. Here it seems to me, addressing now the female side of the problem, that the indefiniteness and passivity of women presents essential difficulties. If one analyzes women who are identified with the Great Mother, they often seem like an imposing massa confusa of emotions, unconscious scheming, animus opinions, and so on, behind which, however, one finds a very small, sensitive, childish ego. And women who are identified with the anima role, though they come off as original and definite when the presence of the male projection is giving them a shape, when they are alone face to face with another woman, all this dissolves into a big sense of emptiness and uncertainty. And when for once one encounters a woman who is definite and formed and knows what she wants, it is unfortunately for the most part her animus that is bringing this about and not her own character. The spinning of schemes and intrigues is also closely connected with this indefiniteness: One does not make decisions, but instead hopes and wishes and keeps an eye on which way “the cookie is crumbling,” then very gently nudges the forces of destiny along a little bit. A little slander here, a little show of inauthentic emotion there, a not entirely unconscious mistake in the right place—all can help the course of things along without one’s having to take any responsibility for it. Another possibility lies in an upright and unscheming but entirely rigid male-like identification with the old collective values—Herr von Spät or the old king. In this case, the indefinite, scheming, and vague woman is to be found in the shadow. Sometimes these two types of women have a homoerotic attraction to each other, just as the two male types do, precisely because in fact (but of course inwardly) they must be united.
Only greater definiteness and very clear definition of character such as result from the integration of the animus can counteract this, because then an objective eros becomes possible that submits to the Self and at the same time can love the other as he is. This goes hand in hand with a renunciation of the archetypal role of the Great Mother or of the “Goddess Anima” and a return to humble humanness, just as must be made by the male puer. The important thing that Jung has done for us in respect to this situation is to show us a way to find this humility without tumbling into banality, without a return to Herr von Spät, without loss of the creative mana, the emotions, and the glamor that surround the figures of the puer and puella. On the contrary, when the puer and puella are understood as the Self and as non-ego, that is when they first begin to bring forth their secret redeeming and liberating effects and to lose their poisonous effect—that of making the ego unreal. Without this acknowledging insight, however, the puer archetype becomes nothing less than a demon of death.
Bruno Goetz introduces his novel with the following poem to the divine boy Fo:
Als nicht vom Himmel wich
die sch were Wolke
und allem Volke,
die Sonne blich,
da kam aus Tiefen
das neue Licht uns nah.
Wir schliefen
und wussten: “Du bist da.”
O Sonnen
aus Deiner Augen Grund
Springende Bronnen
der Liebe aus Deinem Mund.
Funkelnder Geist
Deiner Glieder im Aethermeer-
über die Wellen
Lockst Du zu lohem Mut.
Ewiger Knabe
umspielt von der Sterne Getan
Spender der Labe
Brausend und frei und schan:
Manner und Frauen schwingen in Deinem Schein,
treiben in Tod hinein
neu Dich zu schauen.
Immer ins Helle, ruft Deine weisse Gestalt.
Welle um Welle
rile sind wir alt!
(When the clouds failed to vacate the heavens
and for all the people the sun grew pale,
then, from the depths, the new light came near.
We went to sleep knowing, “You are here.”
O suns from the depths of Your eyes,
welling springs of love from Your mouth,
Sparkling Spirit, with Your limbs in the ether sea
across the waves You lure us to blazing courage.
Eternal Boy, around whom the music of the spheres plays,
Giver of refreshment, rousing, free, and beautiful—
men and women resonate in Your light,
rush into death to see You anew.
Your white figure calls us ever into brilliant light.
Wave after wave, never are we old!)
Men and women rush into death to see you anew! That is surely the most dangerous side of this archetypal image of divine renewal. If this renewal is not consciously realized, the puer image exercises a mighty seduction toward death. In our time this could even become the motive for an unconscious mass suicide. What the increase in the puer problematic could mean for us in view of the current world situation is more than frightening and shows how urgent it has become for individuals to accomplish the step toward inner psychic realization of relationship with the Divine.
Since, as I presume, Herr von Spät, or the alchemical senex, and the puer or infans mercurius are archetypal powers that are constellated in the background of the events of our time as the authors of possession and projections, I believe that we here must keep watch for how these powers might possibly take hold of us or for how they perhaps already have. It seems to me that among analysts, two tendencies that correspond to them have made their appearance. One is a conventionality that wants to make Jung “academic” or “medical” or make him “conform” in some other way. Following this tendency we end up, for example, in “neo-Freudian” fashion with Herr von Spät. The other tendency is that, in puer-like fashion, we would like to “go beyond Jung and have the last word,” little caring whether what we then say is scientifically accurate or not. That these tendencies are secretly identical is demonstrated, for example, by a “puer” like Ira Progoff, who promises as a great innovator to develop Jung further for us—and ends up in Otto Rank’s camp!
We could adduce further examples, sed nomina sunt odiosa.11 We can only save ourselves from these tendencies through greater humanity, that is, by seeing and acknowledging that the two archetypal images can only exercise their effects of negative possession on us to the extent that our own experience of the Self has not yet gone far and deep enough.
NOTES
1. C. G. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” in CW 9/i
2. The author is referring here to Goethe’s famous early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and to his classical drama Torquato Tasso (1790).—Translator
3. C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series, 1973), p. 78.
4. Truth in its crude form is falser than falsehood.—Translator
5. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, p. 360.
6. Ibid., pp. 335–36.
7. Ibid., para. 340.
8. Ibid.
9. My thanks to René Malamud for his kindness in letting me know about this book.
10. “Les extrêmes . . .”: The extremes do not only touch each other.—Translator
11. Sed nomina sunt odiosa: But names are odious.—Translator