Herzog by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2011-04-01T18:30:00+00:00

"You approve?"

"I certainly do. It's a beautiful jacket You look Indian in it, with your dark coloring."

"I may join the Bhave group."

"Which is that?"

"Sharing large estates among the poor.

I'll give away Ludeyville."

"You'd better consult me before you start another give-away program. Shall we have a drink? Perhaps you'd like to wash up while I get the drinks."

"I shaved before leaving the house."

"You look hot, as if you've been running, and you've got soot on your face."

He must have leaned against a subway pillar. Or perhaps it was a smudge from the wreckage bonfire.

"Yes, I see."

"I'll get you a towel, dear," said Ramona.

In the bathroom, Herzog turned his tie to the back of his neck to keep it from drooping into the basin. This was a luxurious little room, with indirect lighting (kindness to haggard faces). The long tap glittered, the water gushed forth. He sniffed the soap.

Muguet.

The water felt very cold on his nails. He recalled the old Jewish ritual of nail water, and the word in the Haggadah, Rachatz!

"Thou shalt wash." It was obligatory also to wash when you returned from the cemetery (beth Olam comthe Dwelling of the Multitude). But why think of cemeteries, of funerals, now? Unless... the old joke about the Shakespearean actor in the brothel. When he took off his pants, the whore in bed gave a whistle. He said, "Madam, we come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." How schoolboy jokes clung to you!

He opened his mouth under the tap and let the current run also into his shut eyes, gasping with satisfaction. Broad disks of iridescent brightness swam under his lids. He wrote to Spinoza, Thoughts not casually connected were said by you to cause pain. I find that is indeed the case. Random association, when the intellect is passive, is a form of bondage.

Or rather, every form of bondage is possible then. It may interest you to know that in the twentieth century random association is believed to yield up the deepest secrets of the psyche.

He realized he was writing to the dead. To bring the shades of great philosophers up to date. But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living-perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

Believing that reason can make steady progress from disorder to harmony and that the conquest of chaos need not be begun anew every day.

How I wish it! How I wish it were so! How Moses prayed for this!

As for his relation to the dead, it was very bad indeed. He really believed in letting the dead bury their own dead. And that life was life only when it was understood clearly as dying. He opened the large medicine chest. They used to build on the grand scale, in old New York. Fascinated, he studied Ramona's bottles-skin freshener, estrogenic deep-tissue lotion, Bonnie Belle antiperspirant. Then this crimson prescription-twice daily for upset stomach.

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