The Force of Character

Some years ago, I had a column in a professional rag called the NAAP News. We called it Letters to the Author and it followed an experience that I had with a reviewer of something I'd written (Oedipal Paradigms in Collision) who pretty obviously hadn't read my rather lengthy arguments. I remember reading his published review and not only being in a quiet state of disagreement but being, as is somewhat more consistent with the truth, pissed off. I decided to review books differently. The "Letters" column would attempt, in the form of a letter, to get in the author's "boat" and row a little with them and then to add the author's response. I would not respond to the response, feeling that since I had chosen the book, I had already given the author the right to last response. Maybe I'd do it differently, now.

In any case, a couple of days ago someone contacted the Editor of the rag asking if the column with my letter to James Hillman and his response might not be available. They contacted me as they could no longer find a copy of that issue. I checked my present computer and my last one and found files that must contain the sought after copy but couldn't open the file of Hillman's response to my review of his volume on ... ach du lieber ... aging. And asking Jim Hillman? He died last year. He called himself a Renegade Jungian after leaving the training faculty in Zurich where, as I recall (or where my mind invents?), I met him when I and Marsha and the older kids visited in 1970. I think he had been training director in the educational institute, there.

How the years pass! And how quickly things are forgotten! Not just the four generations that are typically sufficient for familial memory to lose track of Great Grandma or Great Grandpa. But now I find myself confronted with losses of collective memory in a decade or so.

I don't much remember his response, though it was full of freundlichkeit, friendliness, as I recall.

The editor has lost old copies of that issue.

I never thought to keep them.

My computers won't translate the old files.

And Jim Hillman died.

Zo!

Pfffft! They're gone.

Think that may be connected to yesterday's feelings that had me remembering Lee Hayes singing "How do I know my youth is all spent."

Think I'll go for a run, as soon as the Sun begins its run for the day.