27 Sept. 1939
Dear Professor,
I hope it will be useful if I write of the feelings stirred up inside me by your article “Osobnost a dílo” (The Individual and the Work). I feel as though I understand the path you are travelling, and I am most certainly not attempting to get closer to you through flattery or ingratiation. However, sometimes I have the feeling you have given voice to my “dumb” thoughts. Is it not only right and proper that I submit to the feeling that I must be as accommodating to you as possible? I once wrote to you that I had discerned in you that part of the spirit or soul that is also in me and that evokes in me a feeling of kinship with you (leaving aside my insignificance and your importance). It is something that is still indistinct that has prompted me to throw caution to the winds and write to you, whatever the consequences of such a correspondence. Until this point, from which I would merely be speculating were I to speak clearly. I will therefore say only that of which I became fully aware.
If ever I felt both the need, after such a long time, to grope blindly in the direction of he who speaks, and at the same time Platonically, perchance, the trembling of the soul that recognises the proximity of its archetypes (I realise this is bad philosophy, forgive me), it was upon reading the beginning of your article. Right up to the words, which you must understand in context, the words: “i.e. not to be the daughter of God.” Is this what you really meant? From that point onwards my confidence and strength were lost,

and I was once more thrown into confusion. What torments me is the contradiction between a kind of earthliness that ends and something that I would horribly inadequately call a kind of connection with God, with essence, with enormity, but a connection which, once fully achieved and fully lived, will not be broken after death. As I understand it, this, albeit perchance in a different form, is the central problem of your article. And if I understand correctly, then what, therefore, is the solution, if indeed there be one? It is not your instruction but your succour that I need now, if, that is, such succour is yours to provide.
Enough. Please don’t be angry that I have needlessly filled these two pages; I guess I was driven merely by some instinct. And it is for this reason that I wrote to you that it is impossible to speak to me in the places I meet you, in the Danuj, amongst the masters, where the soul suffers more than it rejoices.
My warmest greetings,
Yours
Kamil Bednář
P. S.
If needs be, don’t remind me of this letter – it is not intended to pin you down, nor is it intended to wrench me from my bashfulness.