Major statements are hot air
There are few books from which I have extracted more noteworthy quotes than from Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift”. As I go through them today, I am stunned by the profundity of Bellow’s insight coupled with his unique ability to capture it with poetic simplicity.
Please enjoy these highlights.
- An incredible description of an issue that seems today more pressing than ever:
“Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness’, I began. ‘Sticking in the mud. Sleeping at the switch. But sloth has to cover great deal of despair. Sloth is really a busy condition, hyperactive. This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought — none of the highest human functions. These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as some philosophers say. They labor because rest terrifies them. The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellects) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous. But this calls for unusual strength of soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with restlessness. It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances.”
2. On the tension between being an individual and being part of a greater whole:
“You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of nonbearing lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other sounds. Cosmologies, ethical systems?”
3. On the very unique challenge of being in America:
“Now Naomi, as I was lying stretched out in America, determined to resist its material interests and hoping for redemption by art, I fell into a deep snooze that lasted for years and decades. Evidently I didn’t have what it took. What it took was more strength, more courage, more stature. America is an overwhelming phenomenon, of course. But that’s no excuse, really. Luckily, I’m still alive and perhaps there’s even some time still left.”
