Saul Bellow - Ravelstein

"You told me that."

"Well, it's worth repeating. Her second husband is also in a finishing school for nonagenarians. I'll beat them both, though. At this rate, I'll reach the finish line before my mom. Maybe I'll be waiting for her."

"That's aimed at me, isn't it?"

"Well, Chick, you've often talked about the life to come."

"And you're a self-described atheist, since no philosopher can believe in God. But this is no belief with me. It's only that my amateur survey shows that nine people out often expect to see their parents in the life to come. But am I prepared to spend eternity with them? I suspect I'm not. What I'd prefer would be to be accepted to study the universe, under God's direction. There's nothing original about this, unless it is after all a tremendous thing to grasp the collective longing of billions of people."

"Well, we'll soon find out, you and I, Chick."

"Why? Do you see the signs of it in me?"

"I do, yes, to be frank about it."

As if he were ever anything else.

Oddly enough, I didn't mind hearing this from him. He might, however, have given a thought to Rosamund. He was at times not quite clear about my connection to her-naturally disoriented by his illness. He had assumed the role of the benevolent intercessor, counselor, arranger. This was, in part, due to the influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political theorist and reformer. But he had initially been drawn to Jean-Jacques by his strong belief in the love that knits persons and societies together. At times he might admit that Rousseau, the genius and innovator whose ideas-his great mind-had powerfully dominated European society for more than a century, was (almost necessarily) himself a nutcase. To get a bit closer to the principal topic here, he had been taken by surprise when he learned that in marrying Rosamund I had not bothered to consult him. I was willing to admit that he might know more about me than I myself knew, but I was not about to put myself in his custody and rely on him to run my life for me. It would also be unjust to Rosamund. I shan't make speeches here about dignity, autonomy, and all the rest of that. She and I had been together for something like a year before Ravelstein knew that we were what tabloid journalists would call "an item." I have to say, however, that when we did get married he was quite good-natured about it, showing no resentment. People were doing naturally what people always had done. The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether. I was perfectly willing to amuse him by being typical, true to form. In the final months he reviewed his opinions of his close friends and favorite students and found that he had been right about them all along. I had never told him that I had fallen in love with Rosamund because he would have laughed, and told me that I was being an idiot. It's very important, however, to understand that he was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured-for whom it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought-no, he saw-that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. I'm not going to describe Eros, et cetera, as he saw it. I've done too much of that already: but there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we would not be quite human. Love is the highest function of our species-its vocation. This simply can't be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments.

He often spoke well of Rosamund. He said she was earnest, hard-working, had a good mind. She was a pretty and lively young woman. Young women, he said, were burdened by what he called "glamour maintenance." Nature, furthermore, gave them a longing for children, and therefore for marriage, for the stability requisite for family life. And this, together with a mass of other things, disabled them for philosophy.

"There are young women who think they can keep a husband alive forever," he said.

"Do you think that covers Rosamund's case? I almost never think of my calendar-years. I'm forever hiking across the same plateau with no end in sight."

"There are significant facts that have to be lived with but you don't have to let them engross you."

When he referred to his sickness it was almost always in this oblique way. Ravelstein was making his final arrangements. Nobody volunteered to talk to him about them. The one exception was Nikki. But Nikki was, in a special sense, family. If Ravelstein had a family it would be an exotic one, because he had no use for families.

Nikki, the handsome Chinese prince, would inherit. The rest of us in one degree or another were not heirs but friends.

In the last months of his life Ravelstein did the things he had a ways done. He met his classes, he organized conferences. When it was beyond his strength to give lectures, he invited his friends to give them: Foundation money was always available. His bald head at the center of the front row dominated these events. When a lecture ended, he was invariably the first to ask a question.

This became protocol. Everyone waited for him to kick off the discussion. At the beginning of the fall term he was still quite active, though when I escorted him to the campus from the apartment he had to stop at every other corner to catch his breath.

I recall that flocks of parrots had descended on a clump of trees that grew edible red berries. These parrots, thought to be the descendants of a pair of caged birds that had escaped, built their long, sac-like nests in the lake-front park and later colonized the alleys. In these bird tenements that hung from utility poles, hundreds of green parrots lived.

"What are we looking at?" said Ravelstein, turning his outsized round eyes on me.

"We're looking at parrots."

"Sure we are, but I never thought I'd see the likes of this. What a noise they make."

"Well, there used to be only rats, mice, and gray squirrels-now there are raccoons in the alleys and even possums-a new garbage-based ecology in the big cities…"

"You mean the urban jungle is no longer a metaphor," he said. "It really jangles me to listen to these noisy green birds from the tropics. Doesn't the snow get them down?"

"It doesn't seem to."

Nothing got them down. The noisy green birds threshing and bickering in the leaves, scattering snow, gorging on berries held Ravelstein's attention longer than I had expected. He had little interest in natural life. Human beings absorbed him entirely. To lose yourself in grasses, leaves, winds, birds, or beasts was an evasion of higher duties. And I think the birds held his attention unusually long because they were not merely feeding, but gorging, and he was a voracious eater himself. Or had been one. His meals were now mainly social, conversational occasions. He was dining out nightly. Nikki couldn't cook for all the people who were flying in to see Ravelstein.

Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition but he didn't want it to be known. I remember how much it shocked him when his nurse walked in-the room was full of friends. She said, "It's time for your AZT."

He said to me the next day, "I could have killed the woman." He was still enraged. "Don't they give those people any training?"

"They're from the ghetto," said Nikki.

"Ghetto nothing!" Ravelstein said. "Ghetto Jews had highly developed feelings, civilized nerves-thousands of years of training. They had communities and laws. 'Ghetto' is an ignorant newspaper term. It's not a ghetto that they come from, it's a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil."

One day he said to me, "Chick, I need a check drawn. It's not a lot. Five hundred bucks."

"Why can't you write it yourself?"

"I want to avoid trouble with Nikki. He'd see it on the check stub."