"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Or not quite, as Jack did not begin life on the island, which becomes home. When a primary school child, his father, a teacher, took him, and his mother, reluctantly from Glasgow, to the island, where he, the father, is to become the Headteacher of the local primary. Jack is grafted into island life, but the graft remains visible to child and islanders alike, this is not where he began, fully belonging is withheld, not unkindly but with the realism of places where communities grew up with one another, in lockstep, for good and ill. His transplantation is softened by his friendship, and growing if unarticulated love, for Sally, his peer both in the classroom and in their joint, quietly competitive athleticism. Yet Jack's arc will lead him away, from Sally through tragedy, and by the draw first of professional football with Chelsea,
When is a bear, not a bear? Answer when it is a Jungian archetype! If you were Sioux, a bear was someone who, over generations of observation, had acquired a cluster of characteristics from which one could learn. In their own right, they were intelligent creatures adapting to their world, living their own best life. A bear might choose to befriend you, possibly as a result of your beseeching, coming to you in vision and dream, one that might yield real-time effects - a healing song, say, or a new herb for a particular ailment, even self-decorating tips (for bears like to paint their faces with colored mud). What a bear would not be would be a symbol generated from your own projecting consciousness, or, for that matter, as an animal, an inferior being. It might be true, as in Christianity, that humans were created last for the Sioux but this did not make them the apex of evolution (as they were in Jung's evolutionary frame) but the youngest and most foolhardy creatures in need