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Saturday, August 12, 2006
As UD prepares to return to 'thesda... ...she surveys her country domain -- a little house on a high hill in Summit, New York -- and is happy. She was looking at photographs of country houses in some book awhile back, and one homeowner had hung a wooden sign over his front door that said WHILE YOU ARE HERE, BE HAPPY. The late Allan Bloom was unhappy in the countryside, because for him life was all about the polis. Nature just sat there, he complained in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's book about him. Human beings were the only really interesting thing. Those of us ambivalent about other people find nothing lost and much gained by withdrawing from them on occasion and being by ourselves. The Bellow character in Ravelstein tries to explain to his urban-only friend that quiet natural settings and their slow routines calm the spirit and keep time from slipping as hastily as it otherwise seems to do into the future. Bellow is "avid for inwardness," as a phrase from Rilke's Duino Elegies has it (a translated phrase, but one of great beauty), yet his political friend Bloom wants him out and about in the big city all the time -- a public man. The real Bellow was as urban as he was rural. His autobiographical novel, Herzog, spends much of its time playing up the affinity between the fevered pace of New York City and Herzog's existential madness. Even when he gets to the countryside, Herzog broods about the wrongs others have done him. During his own life, Bellow kept country places; and at the end, in writing Ravelstein, he paid homage to them. They build, he wrote, "reserves of stillness in your soul." |