It's pithy wisdom day here I guess.
In talking about The New Measures the other day I'd meant to mention a couple of Saul Bellow quotations that figure prominently in the book but I'd only written one of them down and Cambridge doesn't make their books searchable on Amazon. But both of these deserve a place of their own anyway. The first serves, along with a couple of other choice quotations, as an introduction of sorts to the book:
"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 for the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way."
The second comes near the end of the book, and in the context of the argument the quotation is placed perfectly. It was one of those reading moments that made me want to catch my breath and bang the desk at the same time:
"The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted."
There's an art to finding the right quotation, contextualizing it and timing it. The New Measures does this brilliantly. Both of those are Saul Bellow and both are from Humboldt's gift, which I've never read (but I made sure I went and mooched a copy and will get to it soon). I love those few sentences enough that Saul Bellow will forever have the benefit of my doubt.
The last bit especially moves me. Why? I've tried to write about this before and I'm not sure I can explain it any better now without either lapsing into cliches or being incoherent. I will say that I'm tempted to claim those words as marching orders for trickgnosis, whether blog or life, but I don't know that I can live, or write, up to it. "Well done is better than well said" anyway. And I'm grateful for the inspiration.
