Was du suchest, es ist nahe, begegnet dir schon.
—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Heimkunft: An die Verwandten
“What thou seekest, it is near, meets thee already.”
That is my word for word translation of Hölderlin’s line. In so translating it, I have chosen to use the archaic English terms thou and thee to capture the intimacy of the German terms du and dir, which embody the familiar form of address appropriate with someone close and familiar, whereas the German terms Sie and Ihnen are used to address someone with whom one has not established intimacy. In that regard, current German resembles current French, which also still has one term for familiar personal address (tu) and another for more formal address (vous).
I have chosen to use the archaic English terms at issue in order to capture the intimacy of Hölderlin’s poem,[1]an intimacy indicated clearly by the poem’s subtitle, “an die Verwandten.” The sense of that subtitle is perhaps best suggested by the English translation, “To the Kindred.”
The line at the head of this post is the second one in the fourth stanza of Hölderlin’s elegy Homecoming, to give the English equivalent of the German Heimkunft. Hölderlin wrote that poem in 1801.
That was a few years after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which happened in the late 1790s. The year of 1801 when he wrote Homecoming was also some six years before he was confined to what eventually came to be known as “der Hölderlinturm,” “Hölderlin’s Tower,” in Tübingen, Germany. It was in that tower-home that he was given a room to live until his death in 1843.
Hölderlin’s Tower, Tübingen, Germany
* * *
Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously? Fear precedes him, showing that ultimate values already flow towards him. Our hitherto believed values decay accordingly and our only certainty is that the new world will be something different from what we were used to. — C. G. Jung (1975-1961)[2]
Sometimes, we do not realize that we are going home. We often lack the eyes to see that it is so, and we even feel repulsion rather than attraction. When that occurs, we will often project — to employ a notion often used by both Jung and his mentor Freud — our own repulsion outside ourselves, onto that which we are approaching, the very home to which we are at last but unknowingly returning and about to be welcomed back. Or perhaps we will project it, as the lines from Jung above suggest, as the shadowy figure of some un-summoned guest who is importunately knocking at our door.
Such projections of our repressed, repulsed attraction are typically the case, in fact, in our truly profoundest, most astonishing — indeed world-changing — “homecomings.” Those most unexpected, unrecognized events of shocking homecoming come to strike us so strongly and deeply as to bring water gushing forth from even the very driest of souls, just as Moses, in the Biblical story of his leading the parched Jewish people through the desert to exit Egypt, at one point draws water from a massive rock by striking it mightily with his staff.
Such events, which, until they truly do strike, appear to be something very different from celebratory homecomings, are like what is described in the following closing stanzas of another famous poem, to go with Hölderlin‘s Homecoming. This time the poem is Little Gidding, by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), which ends thus:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
To borrow another term dear to C. J. Jung, between the two poems I have cited, one by a German poet and one by an American poet who found his lasting home in England, there is a noteworthy synchronicity. To deepen that experience of unexpected serendipity, as it were, I’ll close this post with a stanza from yet a third poet, this time by a native English one. The lines below are from An Essay on Man, a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744):
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl
[1] In similar fashion, the great 20th century German-Jewish scholar Martin Buber’s seminal 1923 work Ich und Du was translated into English in 1937 as I and Thou, to capture the personal intimacy that is at issue in that widely read book.
[2] From a letter dated September 2, 1960, as cited in Wolfgang Giegerich, The Historical Emergence of the I: Essays about One Chapter in the History of the Soul (London, Ontario, Canada: Dusk Owl Books, 2020), p. 23. I thank my friend Malgorzata Kalinowska, herself a Jungian analyst in Czeladź, Poland, for calling my attention to Giegerich’s book after she read “Disowning Ownership,” my post of January 9, 2023, available on this blogsite.