Dear God,

Dear God, give me strength. Do not withdraw your favours.

Dear God, give me strength that I may not become religious in times of trouble, not become like one of the curs-ed maulvis (mullahs-I should say, tipping my hat to my good Iranian friends), who do nothing but scratch their balls and spit on the ground like wild beasts.

Please do not take away that devilish twinkle in my eye or prevent me from laughing until there are tears in my eyes at the moral brigade and do-gooders, with their cheap two-penny sermons and fake plastic smiles, their phony humility and foaming drivel,their terrifying, absurd pomposity and Sunday-school platitudes that would bore a corpse

And please, God, do not make my readers (the pretty ones) too angry over my joshing in the last post.

Yours,

b.

~~~~~~

It is the unknown that compels us to love. The key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul
----D.H.Lawrence.

His characters are "higher-thought clowns," people who, absurdly, lust for total explanations, for help from the realm of ideas, but whose own lives are confused and cloudy..
---James Woods on Saul Bellow.

Bellow on Spinoza, against the maulvi:

man's desire to have have others rejoice in the good in which he rejoices, not to make others live according to his way of thinking.

From Herzog:

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornamental collection of small glass bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them . They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of colour, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the centre of the wall.

..if he was so confused-both visionary and muddy.

In dusty niches bulbs burned. Without religion.

Gerbasch sighed and walked along his wall slowly, bending and straightening like a gondolier.

It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.

his laughter becoming more frequent, wilder, uncaused.

God's veil over things makes them all riddles.

Among narrow puritans, this is lying; but with civilized people only civility.

..waiting for the ferry, he looked through the green darkness at the net of bright reflections on the bottom. He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean.

..without sufficient courage or intelligence [he] tried to be a marvelous Herzog, a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.

She was in the time of life when the later action of heredity begins, the blemishes of ancestors appear-a spot, or the deepening of wrinkles, at first increasing a woman's beauty. Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.

The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.

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.

Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself. Above all himself, to the end of time.

One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.

He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities of life.

..eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed, and, to the point of death, "comical."