Crisis Seeds

Carl Jung’s Midlife-Crisis Notebooks

Jillian Hess | Noted | 11th November 2024 | U

At the peak of his life, Jung began to experience psychotic visions: “a monstrous yellow flood bearing garbage and corpses piling up against the Alps”. Despairing, he began to write them down in his famous Black Books, “trying to get at what exists when we turn off our consciousness”. In the process, he developed some of his most influential theories, of the archetypes and the collective unconscious (2,200 words) | Share this on X

Seeds Of Hope

Simon Parkin | Guardian | 12th November 2024 | U

How do you protect a precious food source in a famine? During the siege of Leningrad, the botanists managing the world’s first seed bank showed by heroic example, protecting a vast collection from fire, voracious rodents, and hunger. At least 19 staff members died. “It wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection. It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues” (4,700 words) | Share this on X