Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [132]
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. One can understand that in many parts of the world there is no hope for it because of famine or police dictatorships, but here in the free world what excuse have we? Under pressure of public crisis the private sphere is being surrendered. I admit this private sphere has become so repulsive that we are glad to get away from it. But we accept the disgrace ascribed to it and people have filled their lives with so-called ‘public questions.’ What do we hear when these public questions are discussed? The failed ideas of three centuries. Anyhow the end of the individual, whom everyone seems to scorn and detest, will make our destruction, our superbombs, superfluous. I mean, if there are only foolish minds and mindless bodies there’ll be nothing serious to annihilate. In the highest government positions almost no human beings have been seen for decades now, anywhere in the world. Mankind must recover its imaginative powers, recover living thought and real being, no longer accept these insults to the soul, and do it soon. Or else! And this is where a man like Humboldt, faithful to failed ideas, lost his poetry and missed the boat.”
“But he went insane. You can’t lay all the blame on him. I never knew the guy but sometimes I think you’re too hard when you attack him. I know,” she said, “you feel that he lived out the poet’s awful life in just the way the middle class expected and approved. But nobody makes the grade with you. Thaxter is just your private pet. He certainly doesn’t make it.”
Of course she was right. Thaxter was always saying, “What we want is a major statement.” He suspected that I had a major statement up my sleeve.
I told him, “You mean something like a life reverence, or Yogis and Commissars. You have a weakness for such terrible stuff. You’d give anything to be a Malraux and talk about the West. What is it with you and these seminal ideas? Major statements are hot air. The disorder is here to stay.” And so it is— rich, baffling, agonizing, and diverse. As for striving to be exceptional, everything was already strange enough.
Pierre Thaxter was absolutely mad for Culture. He was a classicist, heavily trained by monks in Latin and Greek. He learned French from a governess, and studied it in college as well. He had taught himself Arabic also, and read esoteric books, and hoped to astonish everyone by publishing in learned journals in Finland or Turkey. He spoke with peculiar respect of Panofsky or Momi-gliano. He saw himself also as Burton of Arabia or T. E. Lawrence. Sometimes he was a purple genius of the Baron Corvo type, sordidly broke in Venice, writing something queer and passionate, rare and distinguished. He could not bear to leave anything out. He played Stravinsky on the piano, knew much about the Ballets Russes. On Matisse and Monet he was something of an authority. He held views on ziggurats and Le Corbusier. He could tell you, and often did, what sort of articles to buy and where to buy them. This was what Renata was talking about. No proper attaché case, for instance, fastened at the top, the clasps had to be on the side. He was bugs about attaché cases and umbrellas. There were plantations