Stumbling upon your two great essays made me download and read Ravelstein yeaterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. You are right that what he conjures most powerfully and deliberately about Bloom is not his capital i- Ideas but the tangibility and meaning of his relationships with others and his way of taking seriously the quest for love. One pedantic comment on your Hedgehog essay - "He never admits to teaching with Ravelstein, as Bellow did with Bloom" there are in fact a few allusions to them teaching courses together. Pg. 231 in my copy has thr sentence "We had the house in New Hampshire and a three-year invitation by a university in Boston to give the courses (as well as I could, alone) that Ravelstein and I had given together."
I read Seize the Day, didn’t like it, and have avoided Bellow ever since. It felt like he was trying to have it both ways: philosophical rambling that he kinda believes, but he has it come out of an unreliable character’s mouth so he has plausible deniability.
As far as recovering “prescientific knowledge,” that is what a lot of good philosophy is about. Read Wittgenstein or Spinoza. They aren’t opposed to reason, but tend to stress the importance of intuition.
Studying PSCI at Kenyon, I had more than a few encounters with mentions of "Ravelstein," but in fact I never read it, nor did I even really understand what it was about. This and your Hedgehog essay have motivated me to read it. Thanks for writing.
Good stuff. I think you nailed the attraction of "Ravelstein," at least for me, with your comment about "the need for a recovery of a kind of “simple” “prescientific knowledge [etc]." It pops up all over the book, particularly in the parts I keep going back to.
First, there's the remarkable two pages starting on p. 82 of my Penguin edition; it starts with "That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took..." This is one of the best pieces of writing describing pure experience of the world without any preconceptions, through the eyes of a child, that I have yet come across.
Second, there are the hallucinatory descriptions of Chick's illness after he eats the poisoned fish. This part sort of complements the earlier part, because here Chick is experiencing reality not as a child but as an old man, and through the haze of illness. But the sense of bumping up against natural phenomena unmediated is similarly strong.
I had no idea about the structural connection to Aristotle, so thanks for pointing that out.
Finally read it, Matt. Lovely and good.
Stumbling upon your two great essays made me download and read Ravelstein yeaterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. You are right that what he conjures most powerfully and deliberately about Bloom is not his capital i- Ideas but the tangibility and meaning of his relationships with others and his way of taking seriously the quest for love. One pedantic comment on your Hedgehog essay - "He never admits to teaching with Ravelstein, as Bellow did with Bloom" there are in fact a few allusions to them teaching courses together. Pg. 231 in my copy has thr sentence "We had the house in New Hampshire and a three-year invitation by a university in Boston to give the courses (as well as I could, alone) that Ravelstein and I had given together."
I read Seize the Day, didn’t like it, and have avoided Bellow ever since. It felt like he was trying to have it both ways: philosophical rambling that he kinda believes, but he has it come out of an unreliable character’s mouth so he has plausible deniability.
As far as recovering “prescientific knowledge,” that is what a lot of good philosophy is about. Read Wittgenstein or Spinoza. They aren’t opposed to reason, but tend to stress the importance of intuition.
Studying PSCI at Kenyon, I had more than a few encounters with mentions of "Ravelstein," but in fact I never read it, nor did I even really understand what it was about. This and your Hedgehog essay have motivated me to read it. Thanks for writing.
Good stuff. I think you nailed the attraction of "Ravelstein," at least for me, with your comment about "the need for a recovery of a kind of “simple” “prescientific knowledge [etc]." It pops up all over the book, particularly in the parts I keep going back to.
First, there's the remarkable two pages starting on p. 82 of my Penguin edition; it starts with "That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took..." This is one of the best pieces of writing describing pure experience of the world without any preconceptions, through the eyes of a child, that I have yet come across.
Second, there are the hallucinatory descriptions of Chick's illness after he eats the poisoned fish. This part sort of complements the earlier part, because here Chick is experiencing reality not as a child but as an old man, and through the haze of illness. But the sense of bumping up against natural phenomena unmediated is similarly strong.
I had no idea about the structural connection to Aristotle, so thanks for pointing that out.