" I had an additional burden: my higher education. That counts for a great deal. When that higher education was put to the test, it didn’t work. I began to understand the irrelevancy of it, to recoil in disappointment from it. Then one day I saw the comedy of it. Herzog says, ‘what do you propose to do, now that your wife has taken a lover—pull Spinoza from the shelves and look into what he says about adultery, about human bondage?’ You discover, in other words, the inapplicability of your higher learning, the absurdity of the culture it cost you so much to acquire. True devotion to Spinoza et al. would have left you no time for neurotic attachments and bad marriages. That would have been a way out for you. "

― Saul Bellow , It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future