A Little Book on the Human Shadow

It involves “wu-wei,” not playing any role.

As Plath’s and Sexton’s and Berryman’s lives made clear, nothing has happened at all, and the death energy is still waiting to pounce on the unintegrated soul.

The European artists—at least Yeats, Tolstoy, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rilke—seem to understand better that the shadow has to be lived too, as well as accepted in the work of art.