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A review by daxhansen
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
5.0
Being crazy was the conclusion of the joke Humboldt tried to make out of his great disappointment. He was so intensely disap-pointed. All a man of that sort really asks for is a chance to work his heart out at some high work. People like Humboldt- they express a sense of life, they declare the feelings of their times or they discover meanings or find out the truths of nature, using the opportunities their time offers. When those opportunities are great, then there's love and friendship between all who are in the same enter-prise. As you can see in Haydn's praise for Mozart. When the opportunities are smaller, there's spite and rage, insan-ity. I've been attached to Humboldt for nearly forty years.
I's been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry.
-the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry.
You know? There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive.
That--it's perfectly plain, now can't be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us."
I's been an ecstatic connection. The hope of having poetry.
-the joy of knowing the kind of man that created poetry.
You know? There's the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live. It's become clearer and clearer to me in Humboldt's heartbreak and madness. He performed all the stormy steps of that routine. That performance was conclusive.
That--it's perfectly plain, now can't be continued. Now we must listen in secret to the sound of the truth that God puts into us."