Senex and puer in Hillman

• Senex is a style of life and thought characterised by a sense of time and history, a concern for order, a love of tradition, and a tendency toward the abstract and the regulated; it is rather heavy in tone and depressive in mood
• Puer in contrast, focuses on the here and now; prefers experiment and adventure; looks to the future; wants to transcend laws and traditions; and is light, airy, idealistic, charming, and ephemeral. It raises the spirits, but it has a habit of crashing down.
• Hillman recommends a paradoxical reconciliation of senex and puer in which one influences the other without domination. His own writing has this unusual quality of intense love of tradition accompanied by liberating turns of imagination; odd oxymoron, this unsettling juxtaposition of opposites