Travels by Carl Jung

AT THE BEGINNING of 1920 a friend told me that he had a business trip to make to Tunis, and would I like to accompany him? I said yes immediately. We set out in March, going first to Algiers. Following the coast, we reached Tunis and from there Sousse, where I left my friend to his business affairs.

At last I was where I had longed to be: in a non-European country where no European language was spoken and no Christian conceptions prevailed, where a different race lived and a different historical tradition and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face of the crowd. I had often wished to be able for once to see the European from outside, his image reflected back at him by an altogether foreign milieu. To be sure, there was my ignorance of the Arabic language, which I deeply regretted; but to make up for this I was all the more attentive in observing the people and their behavior. Frequently I sat for hours in an Arab coffee house, listening to conversations of which I understood not a word. But I studied the people's gestures, and especially their expression of emotions; I observed the subtle change in their gestures when they spoke with a European, and thus learned to see to some extent with different eyes and to know the white man outside his own environment.