Describing his early years of existential and(/or) spiritual restlessness, Matthiessen recounts his experimentation with hallucinogens and his readings in philosophy. He hit upon something in a passage by Jung that for the first time in his life made him literally jump and shout with probably more relief than anything else. Matthiessen describes “the search:”
“The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up!’) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ideas,” of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions. The holy grail is what Zen Buddhists call our own ‘true nature’: each man is his own savior after all.
‘…He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization – absolute and unconditional – of its own particular law…To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being…he has failed to realize his life’s meaning. ‘The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.’ (From Collected Works, C.G. Jung)This passage from Jung was the first hard clue to the nature of my distemper.”
Matthiessen seems to realize his restlessness – his “distemper” – is not an aberration, but the way things should be with him. There is a rightness to that restlessness.
Three laughing men by the tiger stream