**10,000 Fans Incentive Plan
As soon as man thinks, God laughs" This is the French writer Milan. A quote written by Kundera in his long story "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" was later widely circulated.
When I stopped overthinking, I realized that there is so much beauty in life," this is Saul, the 1976 Nobel laureate. A quote from Bellow in Herzog.
Saul. Bellow was a literary master, a family of Jewish immigrants, who was credited with literature to think about important questions, intending to "rediscover the wonders of the world under the ruins of modern thought."
Herzog is one of his most important works, and it has been studied continuously over the years. It was welcomed by a lot of readers after its publication because it touched empathy that many people didn't realize.
Open his book, we will find that it may be happy to stop overthinking, live a specific life, and love specific people.
The book tells the story of Herzog, a Jewish American intellectual, who has a mental crisis due to the failure of his marriage and career, and wants to kill his ex-wife and her lover and commit suicide in a state of near-mental collapse, but he finally overcomes the anxiety of death.
Life and death are two sides of the same coin, as long as we live, death will follow us, but it is not easy to think about "death" every moment, just like looking directly at the sun with the naked eye, it is really not long.
But Herzog had been doing just that, and when he learned that his wife had been having an affair with a friend for a long time, Herzog, a middle-aged university history professor, divorced him under duress from his wife, Madeleine, and his spirit was devastated, his mind was on the verge of collapse, and his words and actions became unreasonable. He constantly wrote letters to the living and even the dead, but never sent them.
The seemingly crazy move is because "he wants to explain, tell the whole story, clarify his point of view, defend himself, clarify the truth, and set the record straight."
In his thoughts, he turned the abyss of human history, the ills of contemporary society, the traditions of the Jewish family, and the trauma of the personal psyche into a question that threatened his very existence and forced him to explore"Truth"。
His subconscious mind has shown anxiety about death.
At first, his notes were not in a certain form, they were all bits and pieces: sporadic nonsense, interjections, meaningless syllables, some self-reproachful words, etc.
He wrote: Die-die-regenerate-die-die again--regenerate.
Without people, there is no death.
And: Will your soul kneel? Maybe it works. Wipe down the floor.
"Death anxiety" is innate, and it is a subject that accompanies us throughout our lives. It's just that Herzog is more obvious.
Ellery Quinn said that with the demon of thinking, life is tormented.
We often find that many of us are actually "sick", the reason is that only "disease" can create more inspiration, excessive thinking leads to our brain constantly telling us stories, forcing us into the play, and once we lose control of the brain, it is like a problem with the car braking system, it is difficult to predict the consequences.
Herzog's "illness", his wife's infidelity, and the breakdown of the relationship between the sexes were the direct cause of Herzog's mental breakdown, and it was also the bait to awaken his sense of death. Betrayed by his friends and told by his lawyer to accept vile and filthy, Herzog refuses to accept this vulgarized so-called reality and truth: hitting a wall does not mean that the goal itself has failed, and betrayal such as Madeleine does not mean that faithful and noble qualities are dead.
He thinks that if you don't pursue yourself, what will you do if you survive? Without ego, it is no different from death. So he chose to live in the country, writing letters like crazy, to the living, to the dead, almost insane, just to prove that "I am still Herzog." I have to be Herzog. There is no one else to do Herzog but me."
Herzog's sensitivity and anguish for betrayal were rooted in his traditional Jewish family ethic, which was responsible for the family and a strong love for his wife and children. He loved Madeleine, and desperately longed for her love, and he had been giving without regrets, but in the end he ended up in a lonely and lonely situation, and this broken marriage suddenly pushed Herzog's spirit to the brink of collapse, and naturally made him think of death.
In the face of reality, as an intellectual deeply influenced by romanticism and humanism, it is natural for Herzog to insist on his naïve nature and maintain himself, but the cruel reality forces him to give up his self, give up his individuality, and compromise with reality, which brings him pain and anxiety.
In order to get rid of anxiety, he first reflected on his thoughts and behaviors, and through a large number of letters, he recalled love, family, and interactions with others, analyzed the reasons for marriage, career failure, and some other social problems, and maintained the rationality and self-cultivation that an intellectual should have.
But stimulated by external factors, he almost lost his mind and almost caused a catastrophe. And to prevent the tragedy from happening is an affirmative voice in the protagonist's heart that never disappears: love, family, and responsibility in the Jewish tradition. Herzog eventually replaced anxiety with calm, turned hatred into kindness, and looked forward to a new life, full of optimism about the future.
The story of Herzog, the protagonist of *, is the personal experience of the Jewish author Bellow, who, in a way, is Bellow and Bellow is Herzog. Herzog's strong love for the family illustrates that a strong sense of family is an important manifestation of Jewish tradition.
Many people say that this book is like writing about their lives, isn't that very similar to us back then?
Those who can't kill me will eventually make me strong, life is only once, and the process and result of exploration may be the best gift life has to give us.