Home > Work > It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
1 " The writer’s method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found “the terms of his appeal”. He appealed, said Conrad, “to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder… our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. "
― Saul Bellow , It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
2 " Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy. "
3 " Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective. "
4 " A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos,” Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers “should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics. "
5 " 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. "
6 " Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French. "
7 " How deeply (beyond words) he speaks to us about the mysteries of our common human nature. And how unstrained and easy his greatness is. "
8 " From Hitler he might have learned that angry demonstrations unnerve well-conducted people and that in statesmanship the advantage always lies with the unprincipled, the brutal, and the insane. Hitler could at will convulse himself with rage and, when he had gained his ends, be coolly correct to his staff, all in a matter of moments "
9 " With her death and the remarriage of my father, the children scattered. I was turned loose—freed, in a sense: free but also stunned, like someone who survives an explosion but hasn’t yet grasped what has happened. I didn’t know anything. At the age of eighteen, I didn’t even know that I was an adolescent. Words like that came later, in the forties and fifties. "
10 " He goes on to say that if we don’t have the gift for effecting change, we have “the solace of criticism. "
11 " And it is not hard to guess what he, the descendant of serfs, risen to a position of such might, must have experienced. Confronting the leaders of the bourgeois West, so long feared and hated, he saw himself to be tougher, deeper, and more intelligent than any of them. "
12 " By now I have gone many miles toward the promise of sleep, but I reach my destination blindingly wide awake. My state therefore is something like a state of insomniac illumination. "
13 " But I think I have made myself clear. We are as ignorant of fundamentals as human beings ever were. Self-respect demands that we appear to be “with "
