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One evening - I can still remember it precisely - I was sitting by the fireplace and had put a big kettle on the fire to make hot water for washing up. The water began to boil and the kettle to sing. It sounded like many voices, or stringed instruments, or even like a whole orchestra. It was just like polyphonic music, which in reality I cannot abide, though in this case it seemed to me peculiarly interesting. It was as though there were one orchestra inside the Tower and another one outside. Now one dominated, now the other, as though they were responding to each other.
I sat and listened, fascinated. For far more than an hour I listened to the concert, to this natural melody. It was soft music, containing, as well, all the discords of nature. And that was right, for nature is not only harmonious; she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic. The music was that way too: an outpouring of sounds, having the quality of water and of wind so strange that it is simply impossible to describe it.
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. by R. and C. Winston, Vintage Books, Random House Inc., New York, 1963, p. 228-229.
PLACE: Bollingen, Switzerland
TIME: Winter of 1923-24
CIRCUMSTANCE: C.G. Jung in his newly built house, when the first Tower was being finished.
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