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Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.


Saul Bellow


#boredom #education #inspirational #reading #death



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Did you know about Saul Bellow?

When Bellow was nine his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels. " Bellow's protagonists in one shape or another all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde the dean in "The Dean's December") called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century. ) Bellow celebrated his birthday in June although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar).

Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid a "thick-necked" rowdy and an immigrant from Quebec. " This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved if it can be achieved at all through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture of entertaining adventure drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act or prevent us from acting and that can be called the dilemma of our age.

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