the intellectual life

"I once heard my friend Edward Shils say that the intellectual life was the most passionate life a human being could lead; I think of this when I consider what a man like [Elie] Kedourie does and ask myself whether I could bear the excitement and danger of his sort of career--the emotional danger and the mental responsibilities, I mean."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

almost a requirement

"Joseph A. Schumpter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, is aware of a prevailing hostility to capitalism in capitalist countries. To condemn it and to declare one's aversion to it has become 'almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion,' he says. Those who know totalitarian societies are wondering when, if ever, Western liberalism will recognize its danger. This is what Solzhenitsyn sees as the spiritual crisis of the West. He say, 'You have a feeling that the democracies can survive, but you aren't certain. The democracies are islands lost in the immense river of history. The water never stops rising.'"

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

"Oriental Jews"

"We go into a Yemenite synagogue. The early arrivals have left their shoes at the door, Arab style. Bearded, dark-faced, they sit along the wall. You see their stockinged feet on the footrests of their lecterns. It is traditional on Friday afternoons to read the Song of Songs aloud, and they are reciting or chanting it now, in long lines, un-European in intonation. This chanting resembles the collective recitations you hear when passing Arab school rooms.

"Ben-David knows a lot about the lives of Jews from the Arab countries. He often makes the point that they, too, are refugees who fled from persecution and whose property was confiscated. World opinion concentrates on the Palestinian refugees while these Oriental Jews--nearly a million of them--are given no consideration. It is inevitable that he and I should turn to politics. Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

another bed

“The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom. The credit of revolution is strong in Western Europe, while capitalism, especially in its hated American form, is held to be dying. Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for "the new thing" and will not be happy until they've had it. Baudelaire writes, in one of his journals, that life is a hospital in which patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed.”

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

I do not carry a camera

"Sightseeing with two old poets, Harold Schimmel and Dennis Silk, in the Old City. It's not proper sightseeing, though. I do not, like a good tourist, carry a camera. I've never liked cameras, and I haven't owned one since 1940. In that year I photographed some long-legged pigs in Mexico, on the island of Janitizio in Lake Patzcuaro. I'd never seen such stilted pigs, and they were well worth snapping. The camera came from a hockshop on South State Street and there were small holes in the bellows, so that my pigs were speckled white."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

Before I left Chicago. . .

"Before I left Chicago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg said to me, 'Going to Jerusalem? And wondering whether people will talk freely? You've got to be kidding, they'll talk your head off.'"

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

To Jerusalem and Back

"An old Mormon missionary in Nauvoo once gripped my knee hard as we sat side by side, and he put his arm about me and called me 'Brother.' We'd only met ten minutes before. He took me to his good bosom. His eyes began to mist. I was a prospect, an exotic prospect in old tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. His heart opened to me. It opened like a cuckoo clock. But it did not give me the time of day."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back