The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [309]
had puzzled me for some time. And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biophysicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this scientific training he wasn't going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work. Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians! He started in to tell me of this work of his, beginning with a survey of his life. "You know how there are things every child wants to be. For instance, when I was twelve I was very fast on the ice and could have become a skating champion. But I lost interest. Then I became a stamp expert. I lost interest in that too. Next a socialist, and that didn't last. I took up the bassoon and I quit. So I went through a large number of interests and nothing suited me. Then when I was in college I caught an extreme desire to be--or to have been--a Renaissance cardinal. That was the one thing I'd have loved. A wicked one, smoking with life, neighing and plunging. Yeah, boy! I'd put my mother in a nunnery. I'd keep my father in a gunny sack. I'd commission Michelangelo to go beyond the Farnese and the Strozzi. Spontaneous, I'd have been. Vigorous. Without embarrassment. Happy as a god. Ah, well, what can you do, impose your ideas on life? Everybody wants to be the most desirable kind of man. "And how does it start? Well, go back to when I was a kid in the municipal swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing, kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty squash you in the ribs with their thumbs and call you snot-nose. Shivery little rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balls tight, your little thing shriveled. Skinny you. The shoving multitude bears down, and you're nothing, a meaningless name, and not just obscure in eternity but right now. The fate of the meanest your fate. Death! But no, there must be some distinction. The soul cries out against this namelessness. And then it exaggerates. It tells you, 'You were meant to astonish the world. You, Hymie Basteshaw, Stupor mundi! My boy, brace up. You have been called, and you will be chosen. So start looking the part. The generations of man will venerate you as long as calendars exist!' This is neurotic, I know--excuse the jargon--but to be not neurotic is to adjust to what they call the reality situation. But the reality situation is what I have described. A billion souls boiling with anger at a doom of insignificance. Reality is also these private hopes the imagination invents. Hopes, the indispensable evils of Pandora's Box. Assurance of a fate worth suffering for. In other words, desiring to be cast in the mold of true manhood. But who is cast in this mold? Nobody knows. 'I did my best to be as much of a Renaissance cardinal as one can under modem conditions. "After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically. Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom. "I did a fair amount of research in literature and among modem thinkers. The first conclusions were obvious. Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren't what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you can't change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom