"Herzog" by Saul Bellow *****

> Nobel Prize winning author

>Setting: 1950s, Chicago, New York, and Boston

>Characters: Moses Herzog, recently divorced, Jewish, neurotic, grieving

>Opening Line: "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."

> Vocabulary: 1) coracoid: (also coracoid process) A short projection from the shoulder blade in mammals, to which part of the biceps is attached.


> p.3..."Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness."

> p.10..."A person of irregular tendencies, he practiced the art of circling among random facts to swoop down on the essentials."

> p.38..."I am sure you were sincere. Not insincere. True insincerity is had to find."

> p.39...."Yes, I was stupid---a blockhead. But that was one of the problems I was working on, you see, that people can be free now but the freedom doesn't have any content. It's like a howling emptiness."

> p.40...."No man can satisfy a woman who doesn't want him"....profound? not!

> p.47..."If there were a beautiful poverty, a moral poverty in America, that would be subversive. Therefore it has to be ugly."

> p.51..."We are bound to be the slaves of those who have pwer to destroy us."

> p.53..."...depressives tended to form frantic dependencies and to become hysterical when cut off, when threatened with loss."

> p.56..."Charity , as if it didn't have enough trouble in this day and age, will always be suspected of morbidity - sadomasochism, perversity of some sort. All higher or moral tendencies lie under suspicion of being rackets. Things we simply honor with old words, but betray or deny in our very nerves."

> p.75..."We are survivors in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock. At the realization of such election, you feel like bursting into tears. As the dead go their way, you want to call to them, but they depart in a black cloud of faces, souls."

> p.81..."Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick."

> p.86..."Opposition is true friendship."

> p.91...."He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him. There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam.......His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too simple. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep your mouth shut also."

> p.93..."But this was becoming the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any single life. In this wview the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being. "

> p. 93..."...you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality......to hstorical necessity. And to truth. And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace anbd dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth."

> p. 96..."Now: the first requirement of stbility in a human being was that the said human being should really desire to exist. This is what Spinoza says."

> p. 105..."If existence is nausea then faith is an uncertain relief."

> P. 107..."But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems."

> p. 340....."But what do you want, Herzog? But that's just it--not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy."

LibraryThing Review: I believe this novel is considered something of a classic. "Herzog" is the protagonist......a middle aged man, twice divorced, going through an existential crisis. The entire book consists of his internal monologue, his intellectual ponderings, his correspondence, and his struggle to find some peace. Very reminiscent of Sartre and Camus. I enjoyed his philosophical musings and was annoyed by his neurotic self-absorption. Reading this book is a project.....worthwhile if the reader is in the right frame of mind.