Saul Bellow:"Herzog"

Saul Bellow

Herzog ruminations:

"Considering his entire life, he realized he had mismanaged everything - everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined. But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about. Thinking, on the malodorous sofa, of the centuries, the ninteenth, the sixteenth, the eighteenth, he turned up, from the last, a saying that he liked:
Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness."

-"Herzog" Pgs 5,6

"Dear Dr. Shrodinger, in "What is Life" you say that in nature only man hesitates to cause pain. As destruction is the master- method by which evolution produces new types, the reluctance to cause pain may express a human will to obstruct natural law..... In your remarks on entropy... how the organism maintains itself against death- in your words, against thermodynamic equilibrium....Being an unstable organization of matter, the body threatens to rush away from us. It leaves. It is real. It! Not we! Not I! ....
To have a human life and also an inhuman life....To bite, to swallow and at the same time pity your food. To have sentiment. at the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested ( and why not!) that the reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of the street. "

From one of Moses E. Herzog's letters written in the head but never mailed in "Herzog"- pgs 194,195.

Empire

Exerpt from a review of "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"
by Chalmers Johnson. Review by Jonathan Freedland in the June 14, New York Review of Books

"Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.(?) Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an "empire of bases," he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost. Official figures speak of 737 US military bases in foreign countries, adding up to an armed American presence, whether large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.
Johnson reckons the number is actually higher, if one includes those bases about which the Pentagon is coy. The 2005 Base Structure Report omits to mention, for example, garrisons in Kosovo, as well as bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though it is well known that the US established a vast presence in both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia after September 11. (Admittedly, the US was evicted from its base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) Nor does the Pentagon ledger include the extensive military and espionage installations it maintains in Britain, estimated to be worth some $5 billion, since these are nominally facilities of the Royal Air Force. "If there were an honest account, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no-one—possibly not even the Pentagon —knows the exact number for sure," writes Johnson. Intriguingly, he notes that the thirty-eight large and medium-sized US facilities around the world, mostly air and naval bases, match almost exactly both the thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons Britain maintained at its imperial peak in 1898 and the thirty-seven major sites used by the Romans to police the empire from Britannia to Egypt, Hispania to Armenia in 117 AD. "Perhaps," muses Johnson, "the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty."