Humboldt's Gift (1975) (1976 Pulitzer Prize) by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Ark was going to be produced on new IBM equipment without expensive compositors.

Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain. Thaxter was building a wing to house The Ark. Our magazine had to have its own premises and not interfere with his private life. He recruited some college students on a Tom Sawyer basis to dig a foundation. He went about in his MG visiting building sites to get construction hints from the hard-hats and scrounge pieces of plywood. This was an expansion I refused to subsidize. "I predict your house will slide into this hole," I said. "Are you sure you're within the building code?"

But Thaxter had that willingness to try that makes field marshals and dictators. "We'll throw twenty thousand men into this sector, and if we lose more than half, we'll take a different tack."

In The Ark we were going to publish brilliant things. Where were we to find such brilliancy? We knew it must be there. It was an insult to a civilized nation and to humankind to assume that it was not. Everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style.

Renata, who must have had an unauthorized look at my bank statements, apparently knew how much I was spending as a patron. "Who needs this Ark of yours, Charlie, and who are these animals you're gonna save? You're not really such an idealist--you're full of hostility, dying to attack a lot of people in your very own magazine and insult everyone right and left. Thaxter's arrogance is nothing compared to yours. You let him think he's getting away with murder, but that's really because you can double his arrogance in spades."

"My money is running out anyhow. I'd rather spend it on this com@?

"Not spend but squander," she said. "Why do you finance this California setup?"

"Better than giving it to lawyers and to the government."

"When you start to talk about The Ark you lose me. For once tell me simply--what, why?"

I was grateful for such a challenge really. As an aid to concentration I shut my eyes to answer.

I said, "The ideas of the last few centuries are used up."

"Who says! See what I mean by arrogance,"

Renata interrupted.

"But so help me, they are used up. Social ideas, political, philosophical theories, literary ideas (poor Humboldt!), sexual ones, and, I suspect, even scientific ones."

"What do you know about all these things, Charlie?

You've got brain fever."

"As the world's masses arrive at the point of consciousness, they take these exhausted ideas for new ones. How should they know? And people's parlors are papered with these projections."

"This is too serious for tongue twisters."

"I am serious. The greatest things, the things most necessary for life, have recoiled and retreated. People are actually dying of this, losing all personal life, and the inner being of millions, many many millions, is missing.

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