There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction

by Saul Bellow

there are so many of us, such a multitude, that it is difficult if not impossible to give every man his due measure of attention. If you demand more you are considered presumptuous and conceited. Therefore most men in their self-presentation to the world settle upon a few simple attributes and create a surface easy to characterize and to understand. Underneath, their real, complex existence takes place, their private affair. The code that protects this privacy is powerful and elaborate. Some emotions are in the course of losing their external form, and because they are not demonstrated they atrophy. With them is atrophied a corresponding sense of reality. Hidden effort, self-sealed activity, huge and sometimes awesome constructions of private fantasy, make the sense of the existence of others not what it once was. I do not say that this is not in itself fascinating but it is obviously different. If you cut Shylock nowadays he will perhaps not seem to bleed as others do.