some excerpts from other people's writing

From Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964), I'd been meaning to write this down someplace, and I know I read it as the epigraph to another book, somewhere else (maybe one of the ones Sophia recommended?):

"In substance, however, he understood that she was trying to teach him something and he was trying (the habit of obedience to teaching being so strong in him) to learn from her. But how was he to describe this lesson? The description might begin with his wild internal disorder, or even with the fact that he was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs."

I want to draw attention to, and then table, the characterization of urban violence as "barbarism," which strikes me as an unnecessary invocation of racial slur-stereotypes. It sucks, and I thought about omitting the sentence with a careful ellipsis, but did not. It is what it is--the character is in a specific time/space/class setting and it sucks, but it's there. The character is hardly sympathetic, and the shadow of racialized paranoia only makes him less so. Anyway. I saw Herzog as trapped, throughout his daily life, by academia, its mode of inquiry and critique. As is most directly illustrated in the excerpt, he overthinks his every interaction and relationship through the lens of Big Questions. I have to say, I've been guilty of the same, and when my ratio of thought-time to doing-stuff-time passes some ill-defined threshold, the places my mind ends up are generally disconcertingly disconnected from reality. Part of the value of that Liberal Arts Education we got in college is being made aware of such questions. And part of living a life that will have a positive impact on the people it touches requires some level of conscientiousness, being mindful of the message our actions broadcast to the world beyond their direct consequences. But having to answer to Big Questions whenever you make a decision forces us into inaction, Herzog into what is almost certainly a clinical-level mental disorder. The most important thing I have to learn is how to stay closer to the balance point, avoid oscillating between extremes of uncritical living and overcritical paralysis.


In contrast, from this summer, Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear (recommended by Ada):

"When you look at the surface of the ocean, you can see waves coming up and going down. You can describe these waves in terms of high or low, big or small, more vigorous or less vigorous, more beautiful or less beautiful. You can describe a wave in terms of beginning and end, birth and death...
Looking deeply, we can also see that the waves are at the same time water. A wave may like to seek its own true nature. The wave might suffer from fear, from complexes. A wave may say, "I am not as big as the other waves," "I am oppressed," "I am not as beautiful as the other waves," "I have been born and I have to die." The wave may suffer from these things, these ideas. But if the wave bends down and touches her true nature, she will realize that she is water. Then her fear and complexes will disappear.
Water is free from the birth and death of a wave. Water is free from high and low, more beautiful and less beautiful. You can talk in terms of more beautiful or less beautiful, high or low, only in terms of waves."

There is very little I can add to this. Maybe the suggestion to read it aloud.