Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [154]
“Twenty-five.”
“O Lord!” I said as she washed my fingers in the freezing drinking water. My hand is very sensitive to a feminine touch. A kiss in the palm can send me out of my head.
She took me home in her Volkswagen, weeping a little as she drove. She was thinking perhaps of the happiness her mother and I had missed. And when, I wondered, would I rise at last above all this stuff, the accidental, the merely phenomenal, the wastefully and randomly human, and be fit to enter higher worlds?
twenty-four
So before leaving town I paid a visit to Naomi. Her married name was Wolper.
But I didn’t go immediately to see her. I had a hundred chores to do first.
The last days in Chicago were crowded. As if to make up for the hours Cantabile’s mischief had cost me, I followed a busy schedule. My accountant, Murra, gave me a whole hour of his time. In his smooth offices, decorated by the famous Richard Himmel and overlooking the lightest green part of the Chicago River, he told me that he had failed to convince the 1RS that it had no case against me. His own bill was high. I owed him fifteen hundred dollars for getting nowhere. When I left his building I found myself in the gloom of Michigan Avenue in front of the electric-light shop near Wacker Drive. Always drawn to this place, with its ingenious new devices, the tints and shapes of bulbs and tubes, I bought a 300-watt flood reflector. I had no use for this article. I was going away. What did I need it for? The purchase only expressed my condition. I was still furnishing my retreat, my sanctuary, my Fort Dearborn deep in Indian (Materialistic) Territory. Also I was in the grip of departure anxieties—jet engines would tear me from the ground at two thousand miles per hour but where was I going, and what for? The reasons for this terrific speed remained unclear.
No, buying a bulb didn’t help much. What did give me great comfort was to talk with Dr. Scheldt. I questioned him about the Spirits of Form, the Exousiai, known in Jewish antiquity by another name. These shapers of destiny should long ago have surrendered their functions and powers to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality who stand one rank closer to man in the universal hierarchy. But a number of dissident Exousiai, playing a backward role in world history, had for centuries refused to let the Archai take over. They obstructed the development of a modern sort of consciousness. Refractory Exousiai belonging to an earlier phase of human evolution were responsible for tribalism and the persistence of peasant or folk consciousness, hatred of the West and of the New, they nourished atavistic attitudes. I wondered whether this might not explain how Russia in 1917 had put on a revolutionary mask to disguise reaction; and whether the struggle between these same forces might not lie behind Hitler’s rise to power as well. The Nazis also adopted the modern disguise. But you couldn’t entirely blame these Russians, Germans, Spaniards, and Asiatics. The terrors of freedom and modernity were fearful. And this was what made America appear so giddy and monstrous in the eyes of the world. It also made certain countries seem, to American eyes, desperately, monumentally dull. Fighting to retain their inertias the Russians had produced their incomparably boring and terrifying society. And America, under the jurisdiction of the Archai, or Spirits of Personality, produced autonomous modern individuals with all the giddiness and despair of the free, and infected with a hundred diseases unknown during the long peasant epochs.
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