Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [188]
“Yes, that was Bama, she was six feet tall and she gave him a hard punch on the ear, which he had coming.”
“He’s been in a hundred scandals and lawsuits. He fired shots ten years ago at a car that used his driveway to turn around.”
“He only meant to shoot out a tire.”
“Yes, but he hit the windows, and he was being sued for assault with a deadly weapon—didn’t you tell me? He sounds like one of those crazy brutes who get entangled in your life. Or was it the other way around?”
“The odd thing is that he isn’t a brute, he’s charming, a gentleman. But mainly he’s my brother Ulick. Some people are so actual that they beat down my critical powers. Once they’re there—inarguable, incontestable—nothing can be done about them. Their reality matters more than my practical interests. Beyond a certain point of vividness I become passionately attached.”
Obviously Renata herself belonged to this category. I was passionately attached to her because she was Renata. She had an additional value, too—she knew a lot about me. I had a vested interest in her because I had told her so much about myself. She was educated in the life and outlook of Citrine. You needed no such education in the life of Renata. All you had to do was look at her. And conditions were such that I had to purchase her consideration. The more facts I put into her the more I needed her, and the more I needed her the more her price increased. In the life to come there will be no such personal or erotic bondage. You won’t have to bribe another soul to listen while you explain what you’re about, and what you had meant to do, and what you had done, and what others had done, et cetera. (Although the question naturally arises, why should anyone listen gratis to such stuff?) Spiritual science says that in the life to come the moral laws have the priority, and they are as powerful there as the laws of nature are in the physical world. Of course I was just a beginner, in theosophical kindergarten.
But I was serious about it. I meant to make a strange jump and plunge into the truth. I had had it with most contemporary ways of philosophizing. Once and for all I was going to find out whether there was anything behind the incessant hints of immortality that kept dropping on me. Besides, this was the biggest and most revolutionary thing one could undertake to do, and of the greatest value. Socially, psychologically, politically, the very essence of human institutions was an extract of what we assumed about death. Renata said I was furious and arrogant and vengeful toward intellectuals. I always said that they were wasting their time and ours, and that I wanted to trample and clobber them. Possibly so, though she exaggerated my violence. I had the strange hunch that nature itself was not out there, an object world eternally separated from subjects, but that everything external corresponded vividly with something internal, that the two realms were identical and interchangeable, and that nature was my own unconscious being. Which I could come to know through intellectual work, scientific study, and intimate contemplation. Each thing in nature was an emblem for something in my own soul. At this moment in the Plaza, I took a rapid reading on my position. I had a slightly outer-space feeling. The frame of reference was tenuous and shuddering all around me. So it was necessary to be firm and to put metaphysics and the conduct of life together in some practical way.
Suppose, then, that after the greatest, most passionate vividness and tender glory, oblivion is all we have to expect, the big blank of