Dangling Man

by Saul Bellow

“You can divorce your wife or abandon your child, but what can you do with yourself?” “You can’t banish the world by decree if it’s in you. Is that it, Joseph?” “How can you? You have gone to its schools and seen its movies, listened to its radios, read its magazines. What if you declare you are alienated, you say you reject the Hollywood dream, the soap opera, the cheap thriller? The very denial implicates you.”

“The world comes after you. It presents you with a gun or a mechanic’s tool, it singles you out for this part or that, brings you ringing news of disasters and victories, shunts you back and forth, abridges your rights, cuts off your future, is clumsy or crafty, oppressive, treacherous, murderous, black, whorish, venal, inadvertently naïve or funny. Whatever you do, you cannot dismiss it.” “What then?” “The failing may be in us, in me. A weakness of vision.”

Here you are willing to say that it is weakness of imagination that leads to alienation but not, it seems, that a similar weakness is impairing you politically.

“Try to live.” “How?” “Tu As Raison Aussi, you’re not giving much help. By a plan, a program, perhaps an obsession.” “An ideal construction.”

Even someone like my friend Steidler is under the influence of an ideal construction of an inferior kind. It is inferior because it is loosely made and little thought has gone into it. Nevertheless it is real. He would willingly let go everything in his life that is not dramatic. Only he has, I am afraid, a shallow idea of drama. Simple, inevitable things are not dramatic enough for him. He has a notion of the admirable style. It is poor stuff. Nobility of gesture is what he wants. And, for all his boasted laziness he is willing to pursue his ideal until his eyes burst from his head and his feet from his shoes.”

“But what of the gap between the ideal construction and the real world, the truth?” “Yes. …” “How are they related?” “An interesting problem.” “Then there’s this: the obsession exhausts the man. It can become his enemy. It often does.”

Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago. But we are a people of tantrums, nevertheless; a word exchanged in a movie or in some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another. Only, in my opinion, our rages are deceptive; we are too ignorant and spiritually poor to know that we fall on the “enemy” from confused motives of love and loneliness. Perhaps, also, self-contempt. But for the most part, loneliness.

The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation. Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries.

Army life, he says, is not hard when you accustom yourself to discipline. You have to learn to submit.

A pair of perfect blanks punched out of the calendar. It’s enough to make one pray for change, merely change, any change, to make one worship experience-in-itself. If I were a little less obstinate, I would confess failure and say that I do not know what to do with my freedom.

But now I am struck by the arrogance with which I set people apart into two groups: those with worth-while ideas and those without them.

If I had Tu As Raisan Aussi with me today, I could tell him that the highest “ideal construction” is the one that unlocks the imprisoning self. We struggle perpetually to free ourselves. Or, to put it somewhat differently, while we seem so intently and even desperately to be holding on to ourselves, we would far rather give ourselves away. We do not know how. So, at times, we throw ourselves away. When what we really want is to stop living so exclusively and vainly for our own sake, impure and unknowing, turning inward and self-fastened. The quest, I am beginning to think, whether it be for money, for notoriety, reputation, increase of pride, whether it leads us to thievery, slaughter, sacrifice, the quest is one and the same. All the striving is for one end. I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me that its final end is the desire for pure freedom. We are all drawn toward the same craters of the spirit—to know what we are and what we are for, to know our purpose, to seek grace.

The air had a brackish smell of wet twigs and moldering brown seed pods, but it was soft, and through it rose, with indistinct but thrilling reality, meadows and masses of trees, blue and rufous stone and reflecting puddles.

“Do you really think you can handle all your own questions?” “I’m not always sure.” “Then your position is weak indeed.”

I am somewhat afraid of the vanity of thinking that I can make my own way toward clarity. But it is even more important to know whether I can claim the right to preserve myself in this flood of death that has carried off so many like me, muffling them and bearing them down and down, minds untried and sinews useless—so much debris. It is appropriate to ask whether I have any business withholding myself from the same fate.” “And the answer?” “I recall Spinoza’s having written that no virtue could be considered greater than that of trying to preserve oneself.” “At all costs, oneself?” “You don’t get it. Oneself. He didn’t say one’s life. He said oneself. You see the difference?”

“The mind. Anyway, the self that we must govern. Chance must not govern it, incident must not govern it. It is our humanity that we are responsible for it, our dignity, our freedom. Now, in a case like mine, I can’t ask to be immune from the war. I have to take my risks for survival as I did, formerly, against childhood diseases and all the dangers and accidents through which I nevertheless managed to become Joseph. Do you follow that?”

“That’s what happens. It isn’t love that gives us weariness of life. It’s our inability to be free.”

They can obliterate me. But as long as I am alive, I must follow my destiny in spite of them.” “Then only one question remains.” “What?” “Whether you have a separate destiny. Oh, you’re a shrewd wiggler,” said Tu As Raison Aussi. “But I’ve been waiting for you to cross my corner. Well, what do you say?” I think I must have grown pale.

Mrs. Kiefer’s cheeks were collapsed and her face was moist. It reminded me of a loaf, before the baker puts it in the oven, smeared with white of egg.

Sound was magnified and vision enlarged, red was rough and bloody, yellow clear but thin, blue increasingly warm. All but the sun’s own yellow that ripped up the middle of each street, making two of everything that stood—object and shadow. The room, when I returned to it, was as full of this yellow as an egg is of yolk.

So I went on for some time, until I came to an open place, a lot with a wire backstop for baseball games. The ground was flooded, a wind-blown sheet of water, utterly dark. Behind the backstop was a white drinking fountain and water from it flurring into the warm air. I drank and then I went on, not so fast as before but just as aimlessly, toward the static shower of lights in the street ahead, a spray of them hanging in the middle distance over the shine of the pavement. Then I turned back.

I believe I had known for some time that the moment I had been waiting for had come, and that it was impossible to resist any longer. I must give myself up. And I recognized that the breath of warm air was simultaneously a breath of relief at my decision to surrender. I was done.

I sat in the rocking chair, feeling that my life was already long enough to contain nearly forgotten periods, a loose group of undifferentiated years. Recently, I had begun to feel old, and it occurred to me that I might be concerned with age merely because I might never attain any great age, and that there might be a mechanism in us that tried to give us all of life when there was danger of being cut off.

It was suddenly given me to experience one of those consummating glimpses that come to all of us periodically. The room, delusively, dwindled and became a tiny square, swiftly drawn back, myself and all the objects in it growing smaller. This was not a mere visual trick. I understood it to be a revelation of the ephemeral agreements by which we live and pace ourselves.

feeling that there was an element of treason to common sense in the very objects of common sense. Or that there was no trusting them, save through wide agreement, and that my separation from such agreement had brought me perilously far from the necessary trust, auxiliary to all sanity.