After suffering another humiliation at the hands of the hard-boiled and hardheaded guys who surround him, one of Saul Bellow’s characters (was it Charlie Citrine of Humboldt’s Gift?) reviews his earnest, comical, muddled attempt to think clearly. It doesn’t go too well. And his witty complaint is that after all his reading and studying, would it be so terrible if he turned a small mental profit?
Ha ha!
The blogosphere is already home to millions trying to leverage their intellectual assets to make a quick insight, so one more blog shouldn’t unduly dilute shareholder value or signal to shortsellers that we’ve reached a market top. That’s a weak defense, but I’m feeling defensive. I can’t help seeing the similarity between blogging and the incessant letter writing that is the hallmark of Moses Herzog’s mental breakdown in Bellow’s Herzog. (Yes, I’ve been marinated, pickled, mithradated — as Bellow put it in a reference to King Mithradates’ steady ingestion of poison to nullify its effects — in Bellow’s novels, stories, essays, plays, interviews, travel pieces, etc. OK, so I may have overdone it. But for years I was like a mirror image of Kafka’s Hunger Artist. He had no appetite for anything, and I had no appetite for anything else. Bellow offered me all my daily essential minerals and vitamins. Now I snack on him between meals.) But, to finish this up, if blogging is like Herzog’s letters then it’s also a kind of do-it-yourself therapy. After enough letters, Herzog recovered. Then he shut up.
