1.

A Renaissance of Wonder

Recovery (1950-1960)
Bellow, Seize the Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZb7mbuwqTk Saul Bellow was born in a suburb of Montreal and moved to Chicago when he was nine. As a young man, he became a Trotskyite. He joined the WPA Writers Project. He taught at Minnesota, NYU, and the University of Chicago on the Committee on Social Thought. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Seize the Day is probably his most directly philosophical novel. The title and much of the philosophical content alludes to Horace, one of the Odes. "Don't ask. It's forbidden to know what end the gods will grant to me or you. It is better to endure whatever will be. Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the rocks placed opposite. Be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have fled. Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future." Horace is a follower of Epicurus. He's an Epicurean. That's a view that several characters espouse in Seize the Day. Epicureanism takes as basic principles, one, materialism. The world consists solely of material things. There is no soul. I am my body. Two, determinism. We have no freedom. Everything is determined by physical laws and what's gone before. Three, hedonism. Pleasure is the chief good, so seek pleasure, seek freedom from fear, seek tranquility. Four, self-control. To attain pleasure and tranquility, you've got to know the world and limit your desires. Five, anonymity. Live unknown. Don't seek fame, glory, or honor. Don't make your conception of the good dependent on other people, and especially on strangers. Epicurus recommends the four-part cure. Don't fear God. Don't worry about death. What is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure. Wilhelm, throughout the novel, exhibits weakness of will. Ovid defined weakness of will as knowing the better and doing the worse. Knowing what you ought to do and not doing it. This was typical of Wilhelm. After much thought, and hesitation, and debate, he invariably took the course he had rejected innumerable times. Aristotle had distinguished four conditions. Virtue is the condition of doing the better and wanting to, without having to force yourself to do it. Doing the right thing comes naturally to the virtuous person. He or she isn't even tempted to do wrong. Strength of will is a matter of doing the right thing, despite a desire to do the wrong thing. The strongwilled person feels temptation, but manages to overcome it. Weakness of will is a matter of knowing the right thing to do, but not doing it. The weak-willed person feels temptation and gives in to it. Finally, vice is a matter of doing the wrong thing and wanting to. The vicious person isn't conflicted, isn't tempted, but wants to do wrong.

Wilhelm certainly isn't vicious, but he isn't virtuous either. He faces temptation and gives in. Bellow's novel shares some features of existentialism. "The spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence, lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a hump. He was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things, which it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man was for." But Bellow's description of Wilhelm as weak-willed shows more concern for morality-- morality as traditionally understood-- than existentialism would allow. The existentialists stressed revolt, freedom, passion. Those terms don't fit Wilhelm or anyone else in the novel very well. Wilhelm feels his life as a burden. The business of life, the real business, he senses, is to carry his peculiar burden. To feel shame and impotence. To taste these quelled tears. The only important business, the highest business, was being done. Maybe the making of mistakes express the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here. Maybe he was supposed to make them and suffer from them on this Earth. What is Wilhelm's essence? What distinguishes him? He's the being who makes mistakes. Dr. Tamkin stresses the importance of love. He says, "Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me? 'What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts-- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try." Dr. Tamkin here sounds like an existentialist, someone who holds that we have no essence. "What art thou? Nothing." But he also stresses the importance of love. Our essence isn't to be found inside of us. It consists in our relations with other people. Wilhelm is suddenly filled with love for his fellow human beings. "He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and sisters." He sees in them an essence. An essence which all have in common, and which ties them all together in a brotherhood of man. In every face, the refinement of one particular essence. "I labor. I spend. I strive. I design. I love. I cling. I uphold. I give way. I envy. I long. I scorn. I die. I hide. I want." Note the complexity of that picture of the human essence. A criticism of existentialism works in Wilhelm's realization. If existence truly precedes essence, if we have nothing that's essential to us as human beings, and are truly completely free to craft our own identities and essences, then we have nothing in common but being self-interpreting beings. And if we interpret life and ourselves in very different ways, well, that's that. We have nothing in common. But then it's hard to see how we can, in any sense, form a community. Bellow sees all of us as sharing an essence. That's not a limitation. It's what makes us human. It provides the ground for our being able to treat each other with love and respect. It's thus the ground for norms. I have obligations to you because we have something in common. The existentialist leaves us with a strictly self-regarding ethics. Be authentic. Be who you are. But that's myopic. Ethics is about how we treat one another. And the foundation for that is our common humanity. Dr. Tamkin urges him to live in the present, to seize the day. "Nature knows only one thing, and that's the present, present, present, eternal present. Like a big huge giant wave, colossal, bright, and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the here and now, the glory. Here and now, here and now, here and now. Be in the present. Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant." At the end of the novel, Wilhelm gets caught up in a crowd which sweeps him into a church for a funeral. He ends up in front of the coffin, looking at the dead person. He doesn't know whose funeral he's at, but it doesn't matter. He recognizes, not the deceased, but their common humanity, and he's deeply moved. "Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot. And they were pouring out and convulsing his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. The great knot of ill and grief in his throat swelled upward. He gave in utterly, and held his face and wept. He cried with all his heart. The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind wet eyes. The heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden

himself in the center of a crowd, by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries, toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need." The crowd wonders who this is. They must have been really close, they think. But that misses the point. Their hearts shared the same ultimate need. A need for love, for recognition of their common humanity. By confronting death, Wilhelm was able to see what life is all about, and what his heart's ultimate need really is.

SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day V He was going through an underground corridor, a place he had always hated and hated more than ever now. On the walls between the advertisements were words in chalk: "Sin No More," and "Do Not Eat the Pig," he had particularly noticed. And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm's breast. He loved them. They were his brothers and his sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love? And as he walked he began to say, "Oh my brothers--my brothers and my sisters," blessing them all as well as himself.... VII On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence--I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, scam, I die, I hide, I want....