Quotes from Humboldt's Gift

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“The same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“I got in and started the engine, also turning on the radio. When the music began I wished that there might be more switches to turn on, for it was somehow not enough.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“He yelled, "Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution - a higher institution.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“There've been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn't say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don't seem to know what i think till I see what i say.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“If life is not intoxicating, it's nothing. Here it's burn or rot.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“But such vexations always filled me with energy as well. And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don't get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all - remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

“Suppose, then, that after the greatest , most passionate vividness and tender glory, oblivion is all were have to expect, the big blank of death. What options present themselves? One option is to train yourself gradually into oblivion so that no great change has taken place when you have died. Another option is to increase the bitterness of life so that death is a desirable release. (In this the rest of mankind will fully collaborate.)”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift

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