The Life and Ideas of James Hillman by Shamdasani Sonu Russell Dick

Author:Shamdasani, Sonu, Russell, Dick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

WEDDING IN SWEDEN

After their experience in the Himalayas, James and Kate departed Kashmir in style that July of 1952. Baba Bedi, their neighbor in Srinagar, was driving to New Delhi and offered them a ride in his long canvas-topped convertible “that had been used in the past by Gandhi,”54 (the Bedis had worked with Gandhi for India’s independence). Having shipped most of their possessions on to Sweden in burlap bags, James and Kate were driven across the extra tires on the side,”55 and onto the Indian plains to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, and then New Delhi. From there, they flew to Tel Aviv to visit James’s former girlfriend Batia, who was now married. He and Kate traveled all over Israel with Batia and her husband Martin Strauss, “where I was using old style energy without any direction,” Hillman recalled, and “stayed three weeks.”56

At the time, Gershom Scholem was a renowned lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He had emigrated from Germany in the Twenties, when Israel was still British Palestine, and become the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the university, founding the modern academic study of the Kabbalah. Scholem was also an ardent and articulate Zionist, and Martin Strauss held him in the highest esteem. So when Hillman decided to call up Scholem from the house “to ask him some question about Jewish studies or what I should study,” Strauss couldn’t believe his nerve. Hillman didn’t recall anything more about the conversation, but reflected in 2006 on “the fact I did this without any background!—Martin told this story again and again over the years. I mean, I didn’t know one word of Hebrew nor had I read one of Scholem’s books! Today I’m ashamed even remembering it.”57

Yet, twelve years later, Hillman would come to meet Scholem at the prestigious yearly gathering of multidisciplinary scholars called Eranos, which Jung had been instrumental in starting and where Scholem had been a speaker for years. Hillman soon joined Scholem as one of the Eranos lecturers, getting to know and appreciate the man and his work before Scholem’s death in 1982. As Hillman later realized: “For the young man of the time to phone Scholem was such chutzpah. But for the daimon, if we don’t read these things historically, it’s not—somehow, I knew that’s where I belonged.”58

Following their tour of Israel, James and Kate took a boat from Haifa to Genoa, Italy, and then onward by train to nearby Zoagli, where his parents were staying, having rented a house on the Riviera coast for the past four summers. But James and Kate felt distant from them, and the tension was palpable. “We’d come from almost two years of living in the colonial British world, whether Africa or India,” he recalled. “And Kate and I had grown cold, without realizing it.”59

They traveled with his father to Hofheim and “spent our days in Germany quite efficiently,” James wrote his mother.60 Then he and Kate had taken the train on to Stockholm. There,

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