ellauri042.html on line 817: His moronic patients called him “deeply eccentric” and described him as “huge, a full beard, black leather jacket covering T-shirts riddled with holes, huge shoes, his trousers looking like they were going to slide off his body.” A friend from Sacks’s days as a medical resident remembers him as a “big, free-ranging animal” who one day “drank some blood … chasing it with milk. There was something about his need to cross taboos. Back in those days, in the early ’60s, he was heavily into drugs, downing whole handfuls of them, especially speed and LSD.”
ellauri222.html on line 767: In their quest to find the beaver that gives meaning to life, Bellow's protagonists must also come to terms with death. The message Bellow conveys in almost all of his novels is that one must fear death to know the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Henderson overcomes his fear of death when he is buried and symbolically resurrected in the African king Dahfu's experiment. Similarly, in Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm confronts death in a symbolic drowning. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift echoes Whitman in viewing death as the essential question, pointing out that it is only through death that Sauls can complete the cycle of life by liberating self from the body. Bellow's meditations on death darken in Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December. While the title character in Mr. Sammler's Planet eagerly awaits the death of the person he most values in the world, Bellow contemplates the approaching death of Western culture at the hands of those who have abandoned humanistic values. The Dean's December presents an apocalyptic vision of urban decay in a Chicago totally lacking the comic touches that soften Charlie Citrone's portrait of this same city as a "moronic inferno" in Humboldt's Gift. An uncharacteristically bleak yarn from he old standup comic. With More Die of Heartbreak and the recent novellas, however, Bellow returns to his more characteristic blend of pathos and farce in contemplating the relationship between life and death. In the recent Ravelstein, Bellow once again charts this essential confrontation when Saul recounts not only his best friend's death from AIDS but also his own near-death experience from food poisoning. Through this foreground, in a fictionalized memoir to his own gay friend Allan Bloom, Bellow reveals the resilient love and tenderness that offer the modern world its saving grace.
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