Finally, I've finished reading
Humboldt's Gift. Thus, I have given Saul Bellow a try, and that lifetime goal has been achieved.
Humboldt's Gift wasn't all tedious; there were good moments mixed in among the bad. Specifically:
1) There's a lot—page after page after page—of philosophy in
Humboldt's Gift. (Is that what makes it Literature-with-a-capital-L?) Some of it parallels things that show up in threads here. "Plato in the myth of Er confirmed my sense that this was not my first time around. We had all been here before and would presently be here again. … These matters of the spirit are wildly and instantly grasped. Except of course by people who are in heavily fortified positions, mental opponents trained to resist what everyone is born knowing." (pages 90-91) Looks like Slipped's the sane one here.
2) "Humboldt wanted to drape the world in elegance, but he didn't have enough material." (page 108) Nice sentence—for image and for characterization.
3) A "Doctor Rudolph Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. His books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up." (page 110) The juxtaposition of those two sentences amuses me. I'm not sure why.
4) To me, an interesting picture of Chicago: "The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the street were once filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter yards, lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place." (page 115) Also moves me right on down the path towards vegetarianism.
5) "America … is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is too overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of these spiritual things is proved in he childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system." (page 119) Yep.
6) "… certain bits were missing from her mind. The needle went up and down, there was thread on the bobbin, but the stitching failed to occur." (page 194) I like the analogy.
7) "Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by the unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capabilities." (page 201) I like the definition. If you're bored, do something. Actually I'm pretty sure that's how my mother expressed the same idea.
8) "Whom women will embrace is one of the unfathomable mysteries." (page 208) Clearly written by a man.
9) "The weak at war never know how hard they are hitting you." (page 226) Really? I'm not sure I'm understanding this one. But it sounds profound.
10) "Excuse me for laughing. But you always did provoke people into doing the dirty human thing to you by insisting they should do the Goody Two-Shoes bit." (page 306) Yeah. I've done bad things to people like that.
11) "'Isn't it beautiful out there!' she had said. I looked and said yes, it was indeed beautiful. No more than a glance was necessary. You save yourself a lot of time that way. The question was what were you going to do with the minutes gained by these economies?" (page 323) Interesting thought.
12) Quote from a Samuel Daniel: "While timorous knowledge stands considering, audacious ignorance hath done the deed." (page 355) Wow. Democrats, Republicans? Obama, Bush? Or:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
13) "The time to ask the dead is in the last instance of consciousness before sleeping. As for the dead they reach us most easily just as we awaken." (page 447) But I hadn't asked my grandmother anything!
14) On France: "I need a little more kindness from people than a foreigner is likely to get here." (page 466-467) Luckily, Blanche DuBois didn't visit France.
15) "And was this the famous Romance of Business? Why it was nothing but pushiness, rapidity, effrontery." (page 476) Clearly an MBA is a grand thing to have.
16) Perhaps we're in a losing battle. "… for forty years during the worst crises of civilization I read the papers faithfully but this faithful reading did no one any good. Nothing was prevented thereby." (page 478) Remind you of anything we do?
17) "Walt Whitman compared us unfavorably to the animals. They don't whine about their condition." (page 485) There were many passages and thoughts in
Humboldt's Gift that make me glad I read it. That's one of them. So conditions aren't ideal. Deal with it. It's still life.
18) "These (trees in a cemetery) should have been giving shade already but they stood brittle and schematic among the graves." (page 491) I like the word "schematic" in that sentence.
19) The narrator talks about the machine used to lower a coffin into a grave, noting it hadn't been in use during the last burial he attended. "The machine in every square of metal was a result of collaborators of engineers and other artificers. A system built upon the discoveries of many great minds was always of more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of one mind, which of itself can do little. So spoke old Dr. Samuel Johnson, and added in the same speech that the French writers were superficial because they were not scholars and proceeded upon the mere power of their minds." (page 492) All of which makes me wonder how I dare to write a single word. I know nothing.
Since
Humboldt's Gift is Literature, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Literature at that, many were the un- to only vaguely familiar words:
1) Diffident. "Madly excited, I looked diffident." (page 12) Yes, I've seen it thousands of times and ferreted out a meaning, but this time I decided to check it out. Shy or restrained. Pretty much what I thought.
2) Sinecures: "He (Humboldt) had lined up four sinecures …" (page 17) "an office or position requiring little or no work" Yep. Humboldt would be looking for those.
3) Ephemerid: "…skirring around New York like an ephemerid…" (page 54) " an insect of the order Ephemeroptera, comprising the mayflies" And while we're at it: skirring is " to go rapidly; fly; scurry," which I pretty much figured out.
4) Primitivist: "He is a primitivist." (page 59) Believer in the basics? A belief "that the qualities of primitive or chronologically early cultures are superior to those of contemporary civilization." I was close-ish.
5) Portmanteau. "It's one of those portmanteau expressions." (page 61) Another seen-it-but-not-exactly-sure-of-its-meaning words. OK. It does mean a bag. But as an adjective? Dictionary.com didn't have that usage. Big? Showy?
6) Raglan. "He was dressed in a raglan coat," (page 80) I get that it's a coat. Is anything beyond that important? "a loose overcoat with raglan sleeves." Does that definition mean we can also have "loose sleeves on a raglan coat?"? Dictionaries! Sometimes it's just: why bother?
7) Heimischer. "He was a compulsive-heimischer type." (page 133) No idea. Any German speakers of psychologists out there?"
8) Equipoise. "… stability equipoise and tranquility were the prerequisites …" (page 191) "an equal distribution of weight; even balance; equilibrium." Hmmmmm
9) Pellucid and voltaic. Words like "pellucid" and "voltaic" can be applied to the waters of Volcano Lake." (page 220) Pellucid is "clear or limpid," voltaic "Electricity . noting or pertaining to electricity or electric currents, esp. when produced by chemical action, as in a cell; galvanic." Am I ready for the spelling bee finals yet?
10) Carabiniere. "…under his carabiniere coat …" (page 248) " a member of the Italian national police force, organized as a military unit and charged with maintaining public security and order as well as assisting local police." Or, extended, the style of coat he wore, I guess.
11) Farrago. "…someone made something of such a farrago?" (page 462) " a confused mixture; hodgepodge; medley." OK.
So, Martha, does it even have a story? Not much. But I did like it when the narrator's girlfriend dumped him. (Maybe because I kept wanting to dump the whole book but didn't.)
