Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [139]
“When will life be quieter?”
“I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.”
“You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.”
He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true.
Moreover, there were the dead to. think of. Unless I had utterly lost interest in them, unless I were satisfied to feel only a secular melancholy about my mother and my father or Demmie Vonghel or Von Humboldt Fleisher, I was obliged to investigate, to satisfy myself that death was final, that the dead were dead. Either I conceded the finality of death and refused to have any further intimations, condemned my childish sentimentality and hankering, or I conducted a full and proper investigation. Because I simply didn’t see how I could refuse to investigate. Yes, I could force myself to think of it all as the irretrievable loss of shipmates to the devouring Cyclops. I could think of the human scene as a battlefield. The fallen are put into holes in the ground or burned to ash. After this, you are not supposed to inquire after the man who gave you life, the woman who bore you, after a Demmie whom you had last seen getting into a plane at Idlewild with her big blond legs and her make-up and her earrings, or after the brilliant golden master of conversation Von Humboldt Fleisher, whom you had last beheld eating a pretzel in the West Forties. You could simply assume that they had been forever wiped out, as you too would one day be. So if the daily papers told of murders committed in the streets before crowds of neutral witnesses, there was nothing illogical about such neutrality. On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone in the world had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and this murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice. Convinced of this, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to Dr. Scheldt to talk about Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones and Dominions and Exousiai and Archai and Angels and Spirits.
I said to Dr. Scheldt at our last meeting, “Sir, I have studied the pamphlet called The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History, and it contains a fascinating passage about sleep. It seems to say that mankind doesn’t know how to sleep any more. That something should be happening during sleep that simply isn’t happening and that this is why we wake up feeling so stale and unrested, sterile, bitter, and all the rest of it. So let me see if I’ve got it right. The physical body sleeps, and the etheric body sleeps, but the soul goes off.”
“Yes,” said Professor Scheldt. “The soul, when you sleep, enters the supersensible world, or at least one of its regions. To simplify, it enters its own element.”
“I’d like to think that.”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
“Well, I will, just to see if I understand it. In the supersensible world the