There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction

by Saul Bellow

the best efforts of intellectuals to enlighten us, the books they have written for us, have so often led to deserts of abstraction. After many years of attentive and diligent study we are left with little more than systems of opinion and formulas that hide reality from us. Personal judgment is disabled, crippled by theoretic borrowing. We are bound, in other words, to be skeptical of learning too. Hybrid barbarians that we are, we trusted intellectuals to tell us what was what, we put up with the invented mental language of their “authoritative explanations.” But in the end man must master his own experience. He desperately looks for help in books; but it’s no good, as Kafka observed, to try to imprison life in a book, “like a songbird in a cage.”