REFLECTIONS ON THE TREE OF LIFE,
A FILM BY TERRENCE MALICK
Wandering ones, more than a few,Come to the door on darksome courses.Golden blooms the tree of gracesDrawing up the earth’s cool dew.—Georg Trakl, “A Winter Evening”Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth …when the morning stars sang together,and all the sons of God shouted for joy?—Job 38: 4,7
Who are we? Why are we here? Why do we fall into despair? Why do seemingly bad things happen to innocent people? Why do we suffer loss, pain, and death? What is our place in a vast universe that we don’t fully comprehend?
Terrence Malick’s magnificent film, The Tree of Life, explores these questions in the personal context of the life of the O’Brien family, an American family living in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, as well as in the larger impersonal sphere of the entire cosmos. He does so by interweaving the life of the O’Brien family with stunning, breathtaking cinematic imagery of nature, and through excerpts from classical music by Bach, Gorecki, Brahms, Mahler, Preisner, Respighi, Ligeti, Berlioz, and other composers. Malick chose the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki; the production designer, Jack Fiske; the special effects master, Douglas Trumball; and the composer, Alexandre Desplat, with a precision garnered by his genius.
When I first saw The Tree of Life, I was overcome with awe so great that I thought it would be irreverent to write about the film. I felt the same sense of wondrous, divine transcendence during my second viewing. Now that I have seen the film nearly a dozen times, I am attempting to approach The Tree of Life with care and devotion as I might circumambulate a holy temple. I unabashedly acknowledge my enthusiastic passion for this film which has entered into the core of my being, has inspired and regenerated me, opening me from a long and painful writer’s block and significantly changing my life.
The Tree of Life begins with the above quotation from the biblical Book of Job appearing in black space and suggests an abyss that humans must confront. A shining red flame of fire and light follows this stark first shot. Are we shown, at the very beginning, the mystery of creation containing the oppositions we struggle to understand and integrate in ourselves?
The preliminary images of a film prefigure its ensuing development. After the quotation from Job and the flame we see a young girl looking out of a window onto a field of grass. She sees golden sunflowers and cows. Once outside she holds a lamb, then walks with a loving father-like figure whose arms embrace her shoulder. Later, as a grown up, she sits on a swing, free and unencumbered. Her ambience of innocence suggests a feminine way of being that graces life. As we follow her throughout the film we see a a playful loving mother with her children, a wife in conflict with her husband’s perfectionism, a mother in despair when she learns about the death of her son, a woman who must reconcile loss with her belief in grace, and finally a wise woman walking towards the sea and holding her hands up to the powers that be. In one of the last scenes she is surrounded and embraced by other women who accept life and death and the enigmas of human existence.
Among the many themes in Malick’s film, we can behold through this woman the mystical feminine symbolized by the archetypal figures of the Madonna, of Sophia, of the Egyptian goddess of the tree, and the reindeer goddess of the Siberian Yakut tribes—a sacred manifestation of the Great Earth Mother from whom all things derive their sustenance and whose womb of life is able to create and regenerate and is an enduring source of cosmic fertility. Her ethereal presence in the film suggests to me a way to reconcile the paradoxical trials that earthly life delivers. Her manner entails a receptive, open, meditative way of care and kindness that can meet the conundrum of creation and destruction with which humans struggle in the world. This way of being contrasts with the practical patriarchal domination that places control, perfection, and success as the ways to survive in the practical world and which ignores, denigrates, and sometimes punishes the mystical, feminine way of grace.
The tree that grows in the center of the O’Brien family’s yard and around which most of their family story takes place can be seen as a symbol of the Cosmic Tree of Life. The Tree’s roots reach under the ground in which it is planted, suggesting the family’s personal, ancestral, cultural roots. Archetypally viewed, the roots descend into the dark depths of the underworld—the abyss humans tend on a conscious level to ignore or deny. Just as the bodies of the dead are buried underground, so the roots connect us with death and all of its attendant anxieties. The tree’s trunk, which becomes visible as it grows out of the ground, is the central axis of human life, of the land of mortals, and unites the heavens above with the depths of the bosom of the earth.
The Tree shows us the birth and regeneration of the seasons and the human cycle. The seed is planted in the spring when the primordial act of creation of the cosmos is initiated. As the tree grows its trunk reveals its strength. As the trees branches develop, leaves emerge aflame with beauty. Children love to climb up the tree and dwell in the branches as though they know that there is more above in the heavens to be discovered. In the film we see the children climbing the tree while their mother looks up in wonder through the branches toward the sky. Then, as autumn arrives, the leaves color the landscape with red, orange, and golden beauty. When winter arrives the leaves drop from the tree and reveal its stark limbs and trunk, suggesting a period of bare emptiness, but which also reveals the tree’s undying center. Then, in spring, new growth becomes visible again. Thus the tree is a symbol of cyclical transformation for human life and the cosmos.
Around the world people of all cultures and religions have celebrated the cosmic tree. The dance around the maypole, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Buddha’s Bodhi tree, the North American Indians’ ceremonies in the sweat lodge held up by a tree at the center, the Kundalini Yoga’s ascent up the chakras of the spinal column (the spinal tree), the alchemists’ “Philosophical Tree,” the Koran’s “Tree of Oneness,” and the Christian’s “Tree of Knowledge” that contains the knowledge of good and evil and the resulting possibility of consciousness—all these are just a few symbols of the Tree of Life. For many Christians, Christ’s hanging on the cross made from the wood of a tree symbolically represents Christ on The Tree of Life. (See the painting by Pacino di Bonagido from the fourteenth century Italy.)1
The Shamanic cultures, in particular, honor their ascents and descents into the spirit world and the underworld as a healing ritual. The Even tribe of Siberia believe that they are on earth to care for the Mystery of Being as embodied by their sacred totem animal, the reindeer. When a member of the tribe dies, his or her body, along with the reindeer which is their spiritual totem, is placed in the upper branches of the tree. From there, at the appropriate time, the human rides the reindeer, flying into the sky and to the spirit world.
The Sami people of the Arctic revere the Reindeer Sun Goddess as their teacher who comes to earth in human form as a mother who teaches them to learn to care for the reindeer if they have forgotten or strayed from their spiritual goal. She does not instruct them hierarchically from above, as in the western patriarchy. Rather, she lives among them communally showing them how to attend to the reindeers’ survival, upon which their own spiritual survival depends.2 In The Tree of Life, the mother, Mrs. O’Brien, teaches her sons in this way, while the father, Mr. O’Brien, lectures them like a hierarchical judge.
Jung considered the Tree to be a symbol of the “Self” depicting the process of growth that he called “individuation.” Jung envisioned this process and its goal as embodied in the image of a tree and discovered that many people draw or paint trees while they are psychologically undergoing such a transformation.3 Malick is not a linear, plot-driven director. He does not present us directly with the sequence about the feminine that I have described above. Nor does he deliver an exegesis about the meanings of The Tree of Life. Instead of explanatory dialogue, he presents a whispering voiceover that allows us to sense the intuitions and ties between people. Malick is a cinematic poet who lets us see and feel for ourselves through a flow of interwoven images and musical moods that immerse us in a meditation on the mysteries of the universe. His style of directing is spontaneous, according to his actors. He may give them a script, but at the time of shooting he often intuits more and shoots his film accordingly. For example, in The Tree of Life, when the butterfly lands on the hand of Jessica Chastain, the mother, he did not plan it. Rather, he saw a butterfly hovering in the air and left the set to follow it with his camera. The butterfly landing on her hand was a synchronous event. His inspiration seems to come from somewhere deeper in the Psyche that is mysteriously related to the moment of filming.
He reveals the paradox of choosing between two ways to live—the way of grace that accepts whatever comes to us in life and the way of control that is necessary to help us survive in the practical world. This latter way he calls the way of Nature by which he means the way to survive in the natural world of predator vs. prey.
Towards the beginning of the film we see pictures of the creation and evolution of the cosmos. A long imaginative sequence shows us the glory of nature’s rivers, forests, waterfalls, creatures, and plants of the sea, and swarms of birds flying in the heavens. But we also see the horror of erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, lightning strikes, and planets hurtling toward the earth. The dinosaurs that emerge towards the beginning of the long evolutionary sequence have puzzled, irritated, or distracted many viewers. Yet these primeval creatures show us the predatory instinct of cruelty. We see a large dinosaur stomp on a smaller one as if to kill it, and then suddenly leave it for the possibility to survive-—a metaphor that reveals the predator/ prey aspects of human beings.
Malick shows us visually the poetic insight of Rilke who wrote in The Duino Elegies, “For beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just hardly able to bear.”4 Many viewers have been bewildered by the juxtaposition of the long natural sequences of creation interwoven with the story of the personal struggles of the O’Brien family in Texas. Yet the trials of the O’Brien family are a reflection of the enigmas of the Cosmos.
After the initial shots of the young girl serene in nature, the film flashes forward to the girl, now a mother who, with her husband, has raised a family of three boys. An unexpected knock at the door brings with it a telegram that announces the death of their youngest nineteen-year-old son. The cause is unknown, but both mother and father are shocked and plunged into grief. How could this happen to a family that has tried in their different ways to be good Christian people? Overwhelmed by heartbreak and despair, Mrs. O’Brien, the mother, reflects on life and death. As though whispering to God she says,
There are two ways in life—the Way of Nature (survival) and the Way of Grace. You must choose which one you will follow. The Way of Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten; it accepts insults and injuries. But the Way of Nature only wants to please itself and to have others to please it too. It wants to have its own ways and it likes reasons to be unhappy even though all the world is shining around it and when love is smiling through all things. The one who is true to the Way of Grace accepts whatever comes.
Her grief is insufferable and we see her cry as she walks around the neighborhood with her husband following behind her trying to comfort her. She says: “I want to die and be with him.” But her own mother reminds her that her son is now in God’s hands and she still has her other two sons. She tells her to be strong and that the overwhelming pain she feels will pass in time. As the Bible says: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. That’s the way he is.” The grief-stricken father (played by Brad Pitt) laments that he has been too strict with his sons, that when he slapped them he never said he was sorry. Guilty and ashamed, he, too, must reflect on the way he has led his life.
The life of the O’Brien family reflects that of many others. We see their joy as a couple in their early love for each other and at the birth of their sons. Mr. O’Brien, the father, is an engineer and former Naval officer with aspirations to be an inventor. But his passion was to be a musician and he is happiest when he is at the piano playing Bach and listening to his music. He tries to impose his lost aspirations on his oldest son, Jack (played by Hunter McCracken) and through whose eyes the film is primarily seen.
A strict but loving father, O’Brien attempts to bring up his sons to be good, successful citizens. When Jack is young, he teaches him to plant a tree and shows him how to take care of it. He teaches him limits by pointing out the boundaries of their property. When Jack forgets to weed the earth in which the tree is planted, his father chastises him. Caring for the tree, which is a symbol of life itself, is central to the O’Brien’s existence and indeed to all of existence. But care requires tenderness, love, and compassion—not only the rigor of discipline.
Although he feels tenderness for his sons, O’Brien is a strict disciplinarian and requires Jack to learn to play the piano and to appreciate Bach as he had. But Jack is not as musically inclined and must endure lessons given by his domineering father. O’Brien also insists that his sons call him “Father” and not simply Dad. He forces his sons to obey him. If they rebel he punishes them severely. As O’ Brien grows older he becomes overtaken by the desire for success and money—a desire that seems to be in conflict with his spiritual side. He becomes cynical and begins to punish his sons more harshly when they disobey him; he even falls into rages that frighten his wife and children. He criticizes his wife for being naïve and too easy on her children. O’Brien tells his sons that it takes a fierce will to get ahead in the world and that they shouldn’t let anyone take advantage of them. There is nothing they cannot do, he says. At one point he tells Jack not to be like him because he gave up his dream and let himself be sidetracked. In this way he lost his chance to be a great musician.
In contrast, Mrs. O’Brien is a tender, loving mother, playful with her children, herself a child of the earth. She walks barefoot on the grass. When she looks up through the tree that is the center of the family’s yard, she sees spirit in the heavens. She raises her children to be kind and tries to protect them from life’s brutalities. Nevertheless, as they grow up, they begin to see suffering in the form of a neighbor boy’s wounds, a blind man, and the way black people are treated. She teaches them to be compassionate.
Just as Mr. O’Brien represents the strict patriarchal father of the Old Testament, so Mrs. O’Brien represents the tender, playful earth mother who loves her children. Her relationship to growing things and to spiritual life is so natural that we see her able to float in the air around the tree (a scene reminiscent of the mother in the films of the Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky).5 She is so open and receptive to life around her that when a butterfly (a symbol of the Psyche) glides through the air it lands on her welcoming, outstretched hand. When Mr. O’Brien is away on business, mother and sons feel free and play with each other. When he returns the atmosphere becomes strained and tense.
As Jack grows older, he witnesses his father’s stern and unforgiving behavior as well as his mother’s fear of the way O’Brien treats his children. She does not stand up to her husband directly (a typical behavior for women in the 1950s), but she shows her anger in her eyes and by distancing herself as much as she can from him. A scene at dinner shows the father disciplining the boys and telling them not to speak. When the youngest, gentlest son, R. L. (played by Lawrence Epler), who has the musical talent that Jack is lacking, disobeys his father by speaking, O’Brien flies into a rage and chases the boy out of the room to punish him. Their mother tries to protect them but is helpless before her husband’s violence. O’Brien tells his wife that she turns his sons against him and grabs her trying to force her affection. But she resists in tears.
Jack observes their interaction in disgust and later tells his mother that she lets her husband run over her. During this period Jack’s sexuality begins to burgeon as he watches his mother water the lawn in her bare feet. He sneaks into a neighbor’s house, goes through her underwear drawer and steals lingerie. Guilty, he runs to cover up his misdeed. First he tries to bury it; then he throws the slip into a creek. Jack is shamefaced when he returns home. He tries to avoid his mother who untypically wears a dark dress and meets his eyes with disapproval. He senses that she knows what he has done and tells her that he cannot face her.
During this period Jack wishes for the death of his father. He resists a chance to let their car fall on his father who is at work under the car trying to fix it. We also see Jack become jealous of the musical talent of his youngest brother. Jack tricks R. L., asking him to put his guitar finger at the front of a gun. When the young boy does so, Jack shoots the gun and injures R. L.’s finger.
In a scene set in the family’s church the preacher gives a sermon about Job. The preacher tells the congregation that misfortune befalls the good as well as the bad and that humans cannot protect their children. He asks if there is a fraud in the universe. Is there nothing that is deathless, that does not pass away? Job, too, trusted the Lord. No one knows what sorrow may visit. Job, who was good, had everything taken away. There is no hiding place, the preacher says. No one knows when God might visit their home; when God gives and when God takes away.
As the family leaves the church, O’Brien looks at the tree in the churchyard. Then, on the way home, he drives through a wealthy neighborhood. In envy he tells his sons that if a person wants to succeed they can’t be good; the world lives by trickery. O’Brien’s cynicism overtakes him.
Darkness descends upon the once happy O’Brien family. Mr. O’Brien, who craved success and has tried to teach his boys to model themselves after him, is dismissed from his job and is transferred to another place. Humbled, he now admits to Jack that he has failed him by being too tough on him and that he is not proud of his actions. He says that all he wanted was to be loved, but that now he is nothing because he dishonored love and beauty by not noticing the glory. He acknowledges that he has been a foolish man. He tells Jack that he only wanted him to be strong and to be his own boss. Jack, who has been wrestling with the guilt of his hatred for his father, replies “I’m more like you than her.” His father hugs Jack and tells him that he loves him, that he is all that he has and wants to have. When the family must move from their house, the boys look in anguish at the tree and the tree house they had built to play in. Their mother reminds them that the only way to be happy is to love and that unless you love your life will flash by.
Throughout the film Malick shows us the grown-up Jack (played by Sean Penn) who has become a successful architect and who has followed the way his father had wanted. He lives with his wife in a huge house of glass and steel, bare, modern, and impersonal. The couple shows no emotional expression to each other. As the older Jack now mourns the death of his youngest brother, he also reflects on his life. He remembers the struggles of his soul—the conflict he experienced between the two opposing ways of his mother and his father.
“How did my mother bear it?” he asks himself. Then he addresses the Lord, whispering “Why? Where were You? What are we to You?” He is shown in a city of stone and skyscrapers, taller than the trees he knew. But he sees one tree struggling to grow. The death of his brother has brought the older Jack before the very choice his mother mentions at the beginning of the film—the Way of Grace or the Way of survival and success.
A scene shows the older Jack walking through a canyon of rock and then on sand. A simple threshold made of wood from a tree is before him. He must make the choice whether to go through the threshold to another way of being or to stay with the success he has made for himself. His wife walks through, but the older Jack hesitates—then finally steps through the threshold and is on sand by the ocean.
“Call me,” he cries out. He sees his younger self, his mother, his father, and his brothers. Many others also walk in this contrasting realm. A ladder reaches to the sky. The older Jack opens his hand, reaching out. Finally, he kneels and sees the people who have inhabited his life. He embraces his mother, his father, his brothers and all those he encounters. He sees the glory of the setting sun, the birds flying in the heavens, the beauty of a waterfall. He sees his mother opening a door. She says goodbye to her youngest son, lets him go to God, and accepts her loss saying: “I give him to You.”
A group of women surround his mother and support her. They represent the strength and presence of the archetypal, mystical feminine. She walks toward the ocean, her hands up in prayer, and says, Amen. Then we see a glorious golden field of sunflowers singing their hymn to the mystery of the universe. As the film ends, the older Jack is back in the city of steel, looking up at the skyscrapers but smiling at the tree. A bridge crosses a river from one bank to another. Finally we see the flame of creation.
Some critics and viewers find the final scene to be a vision of the afterlife while others see it as returning to the field of memory. While either of these is possible, I see the ending as emblematic of the compassion and community that can be found through the Way of Grace despite the fact that we must continually struggle to survive.
At the end, the older Jack is back in the city and not in an afterlife. He is challenged by his experiences: how is he to live his life. Although the skyscrapers may dominate, he is able to see the Tree of Life and smile at the paradoxes of human existence. One of the last images of the film, a bridge, suggests a continual crossing that must be made between various realms. We are left at the end of the film with the last image—the red flame of continual re-creation.
TERRENCE MALICK AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Malick studied and later taught philosophy before he started making films. He was deeply influenced by the writing of Martin Heidegger and translated Heidegger’s Von Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reason), which was published by Northwestern Press in 1969. I see Malick’s influence from Heidegger’s philosophy as one of the roots of The Tree of Life.
In brief, Heidegger asked the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” After a long dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition, Heidegger came to see that humans (Da-sein) have a unique presence in the Mystery of Being. Humans are here, Heidegger said, to reveal and to care for the Mystery of Being. At the same time, they must learn to control and to focus on practical matters in order to survive. Thus, humans bear within themselves a unique tension—to survive in the practical world and to care for the greater Mystery of the Cosmos. They are, so to speak, at a crossroads or threshold where they must learn to live with this paradox inherent to the human condition. This requires two ways of being—a meditative way of being that is receptive, open, and cares for the Mystery of Being (as a shepherd cares for his sheep), and a rational, calculative, controlling way that fosters survival. Because the controlling mode is practical, brings immediate results, and is easier to follow, the tendency is to rely upon the calculative approach and even to forget about the greater Mystery of Being that we are here to care for and to reveal. Heidegger writes about these two ways of being in his later works, specifically his book on Gelassenheit. The word, “Gelassenheit,” is hard to translate directly but means to let be, to live in a receptive mode of being—a mode that leads to serenity.6
The O’Brien family exemplifies the difficulties of living in this paradox. The father, Mr. O’Brien, eventually chooses the practical way of survival; he overrides his spirituality and ultimately his great passion for music which gives expression to the greater mystery. The mother, Mrs. O’Brien, chooses the Way of Grace while acknowledging the necessity of dealing with the practical world. Jack, who witnesses the divergent ways of his mother and his father, is faced with this choice after the death of his younger brother. Having wrestled with this conflict during most of his life, he finally chooses to pass from the emphasis on survival and go through the threshold to the realm of grace.
However, we are shown that the choice recurs in our lives when we see the last earthly image of the film—the bridge. The bridge is there to remind us that the crossings are continual and that we dwell in a liminal space. As Heidegger reminds us in his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” the bridge brings us before the “Four-fold"—the unity of the earth, the sky, the divinities, and the mortals—and continually summons us to learn to dwell with grace, care, kindness, and compassion as we honor the mystery of Being and accept the paradox of being human.7
TERRENCE MALICK’S BACKGROUND AND FILMOGRAPHY
Although Malick protects his private life, prohibits photographs, and does not give public interviews or promotions for his films, it is known that he was born on November 20, 1945. His mother was a farm girl from the Midwest and his father was a geologist, the son of Assyrian Lebanese Christian immigrants. He had two brothers, one of whom died early, and it is likely that the inspiration for The Tree of Life is partly autobiographical. (With respect for Malick’s desire for privacy, I have chosen to limit these echoes from his private life.)
Malick studied at St. Stephen’s School in Austin, Texas. In the summertime he worked as a farmhand, on an oil rig, and at a cement factory. Later he studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude in 1965. Then he won a Rhodes scholarship and studied at Oxford for a while. He freelanced as a journalist for Newsweek, Life, and the New Yorker, and spent a number of years living in Paris, traveling around the world, and taking photographs. He also taught philosophy at MIT with an emphasis on Heidegger and translated Heidegger’s Von Wesen des Grundes, as noted above. Then he decided to go to the American Film Institute Conservatory and graduated with an MFA in film. He wrote a number of screenplays before directing his first major film in 1973.
In 1973, he directed an independent film, The Badlands (starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) about a young couple on a crime spree during the 1950s. The film received raves at the New York Film Fest, was picked up by Warner Brothers, and earned three times the money that was spent to produce it.
Malick made his next film, Days of Heaven, in 1978. The film was about a love triangle set in the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century. Days of Heaven received an Academy Award for best Cinematography and Malick won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. The film revealed placid images of nature in a quiet contrast to the evil deeds of man and used a rambling voiceover which became emblematic of Malick’s films. Using natural lighting he created stunning cinematography and a striking use of music that revealed the narrative, emotion, and idea through image and sound. Days of Heaven brought Malick as a director to my attention, and I still remember my awe as I watched the film in all of its beauty.
In 1998, Malick directed The Thin Red Line, a loose adaptation of James Jones’s World War II novel. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the prestigious Golden Bear award at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival.
In 2005, Malick brought out a film called The New World—a film that he had begun developing in the 1970s. The New World was a romantic story between John Smith and Pocahontas. It received mixed reviews but was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
The Tree of Life was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 and won its highest honor, the coveted Palm d’Or prize. It also received the FIPRESCI Prize in August 2011, and the International Film Critics Best Film of the Year award in August 2011 at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Since then it has received a multitude of awards from film festivals, including Toronto, London, Chicago, San Diego, Australia, Los Angeles, from the American Writers’ Circle, Dallas-Fort Worth, the American Film Institute, and the Gotham Award among others.
In 2012, the film was nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography categories.
Malick is currently at work on two new films.
NOTES
1. A wealth of images and information about The Tree of Life can be found in Roger Cook, The Tree of Life (Thames and Hudson, 1988).
2. Linda Schierse Leonard, Following the Reindeer Woman: Path of Peace and Harmony (Spring Journal Books, 2010).
3. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, translated by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 251–349.
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Spender and J. B. Leishman (W. W. Norton, 1939).
5. The Tarkovsky film in which the mother ascends in the air is The Mirror. A picture of this scene can be found in Tarkovsky’s book, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter Blair (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 155.
6. The book has been translated into English by John Anderson and E. M. Freund as Discourse on Thinking (Harper and Row, 1966).
7. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 145–61.
Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 87 (Summer 2012): 223–36
© Copyright 2025 Spring Publication, Inc. and the author