Bellow’s Letters: Two Quotations
Saul Bellow (Photo Credit: Bettmann/Corbis via The New York Times)
“Really,” Bellow writes to Lionel Trilling in 1952, “things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it!”
“A language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us,” and in that palace Bellow was sovereign. “The only sure cure is to write a book,” he advises Alice Adams.
Drawn from Leon Wieseltier’s excellent essay in the November 18, 2010 issue of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
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