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.