137 - Arthur I. Miller [115]
She was two years younger than he, so she would have been fifty-three. Nevertheless, when she came through the revolving doors he saw that she was still beautiful, blonde, and alluring. “This young woman suddenly appears qua woman. (Regeneration motif! N.B. shortly before, on 4 November, my father died) and she was in good health,” he wrote to Fierz.
For two hours they talked intensely. “A whole lifetime of 30 years passed before me—her cure, a marriage, and a divorce, with war and National Socialism as a historical background.”
Perhaps, he thought, the situation was archetypal, a fairytale “being played out.” After all, November 29, the night that she contacted him, was the night of the full moon. The first time they met, he recalled, had been in his Jekyll and Hyde days in Hamburg:
30 years ago my neurosis was clearly indicated in the complete split between my day life and my night life in my relations with women, but now it was very human.
As for seeing her again—“erotic it was not.” Rather it was a painful reminder of the very different person he had been thirty years earlier:
I saw myself as in a dark mirror, in a time 30 years previous with its sharp cut between the worlds of night and day, which I worked strenuously to maintain—until the breakdown of 1930 came upon me (my great life crisis). In the day calming works, in the night sexual entertainment in the underworld—without feeling, without love, indeed without humanity. “What price glory!”
Pauli told her that he regretted falling out of contact. He recalled how pretty she had been in those days and, he added, now too. A human life unrolled before him. He felt ashamed that he had no more to say. “But should I speak—‘speak, speak’—what should I say,” he thought, in French. As with the “strangers” in his dream who wanted him to speak about his feelings, he was tongue-tied in front of this woman.
“One should not give up hope,” he wrote to Fierz. “I gave up on this young lady in 1925, too early. But, personally, even if she at the time would have been entirely healthy, the life rhythms were not so. (It is very probable, that at that time I kept away from her—I wanted at that time no external connection [no relationship]).”
The woman walked Pauli to his train. When they arrived they were both aware that this was a moment that would not occur again. Pauli told her how pleased he was to have seen her again. He was married, he said, lived in Zürich, and was easily within reach. He thought of kissing her, then hesitated and decided not to. “Now it was as friends—at that time not.”
He described their parting to Jung:
But now it was very human, and as we parted on the platform, it seemed to me like a coniunctio. Alone in the express train to Zürich, my mind went back to 1928 as I took the same route toward my new professorship and my great neurosis. I may be a little less efficient than in those days, but I think the prospects are a bit brighter as regards my mental and spiritual well-being.
Afterward Pauli could not put the meeting out of his mind. In search of a deeper understanding of it he thought back to Fierz’s comment on his dream about the blackboard. Fierz had pointed out the fourness it contained in the four symbols in Pauli’s equation as well as the four quantum numbers. All of a sudden, Pauli realized that this research was part of his tumultuous past, his Hamburg days. The blackboard dream had occurred before the death of his father, a defining episode in his life. Meeting the woman in Hamburg made him realize that he had broken with that past. “There was a transformation in those 30 years, at the [station] platform [where they said goodbye] it had for me somewhat of a humanistic-conciliatoriness, a ‘coniunctio.’…My individual life attained a sense of symmetry between past and present,” he wrote to Fierz. Just as Fierz had suggested, the number four held the key to his “biographical experience.” Pauli’s train ride was not to meet his neurosis but to return home.
“May sometime the preacher of dreams make it possible