Mr. Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow

"Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."    Max Weber

Things met with in this world are tied to the forms of our thinking. We see what is before us, the present, the objective. Eternal being makes its temporal appearance in this way. The only way out of captivity in the forms, out of confinement in the prison of projections, the only contact with the eternal, is through freedom.

Nothing seemed to hurt quite so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice.

It had never greatly mattered, and mattered less than ever now, in the seventies. But a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world. Sammler now even vaguely recalled hearing that a President of the United States was supposed to have shown himself in a similar way to the representatives of the press(asking ladies to leave), and demanding to know whether a man so well hung could not be trusted to lead this country.

- it was plain that the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality. In other words triumphant in forms of deceit and hardness of heart considered by the political order as a whole to be productive; kinds of cheating or thieving or (at best) wastefulness which on the whole caused the gross national product to increase.

He wanted, with God, to be free from the bondage of the ordinary and the finite. A soul released from Nature, from impressions, and from everyday life. For this to happen God Himself must be waiting, surely. And a man who has been killed and buried should have no other interest. He should be perfectly disinterested. Eckhardt said in so many words that God loved disinterested purity and unity. God Himself was drawn toward the disinterested soul. What besides the spirit should a man care for who has come back from the grave? However, and mysteriously enough, it happened, as Sammler observed, that one was always, and so powerfully, so persuasively, drawn back to human conditions... All postures are mocked by their opposites. This is what happens when the individual begins to be drawn back from disinterestedness to creaturely conditions. Portions or aspects of his earlier self revive.

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish...And we know from photographs the astronauts took, the beauty of the earth, its white and its blue, its fleeces, the great glitter afloat. A glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to abide here, an unconscious collaboration of all souls spreading madness and poison?

To some people, true enough, experience seemed wealth. Misery worth a lot. Horror a fortune. Yes, But I never wanted such riches.