So Karla felt sick last night and wanted me to grab something for her crom the library. Fair enough. I picked up a 1956 copy of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and am pleasantly surprised by Dostoevsky's misanthropic non-fiction voice. Skewed slavophile to be sure, but has some fun ripping on the French. Even more surprising was Saul Bellow's foreword. Writing about his own experiences living in Paris for a year, he contrasts the American attitude toward possessions with that of his meticulous French landlady. The passage was so insightful, so contemporary, I"ll have to quote at some length:
"In America, we have a slovenly attitude toward possessions. Most of us could not give a list of the objects we own. We are decidedly more interested in the things we do not own. We lust after them, acquire them, and after we have rejoiced in them a little while drop out of sight. Our glance passes half blindly over them, on the wall, on the table, on our own persons. Very likely we serve our social order by this mixture of desire and blindness. The goods our industries produce must be used. They are advertised. We desire them, and work and earn in order to buy them. It is our duty. Manufacture is prodigal. Consuming, we follow it as well as we can. The goods of the inventaire are different. They are finite. There is a shore. The owner rules over his kingdom of things, whereas we Americans are in the grip of boundless desire. Perhaps this accounts for the prevalence of the true-love quest in our country, and for the rise of the divorce rate. Who knows? I make the suggestionin, as Dostoevsky calls it, a spirit of idleness...That our desires are infinite does not mean that we are spiritual; it means that we are not sure what satisfaction is. We are astonished and confused by the profusion of things around us, we do not know how to choose among them, we are ill at ease and fear for our souls."
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