Likes

"Anyhow, I found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering." pg. 194 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

So I am reading along in this book, a big book with a full complement of adventures and I am considering how the main character, Augie March, experiences his life one step at a time and instead takes it as it comes. Thie isn't to say he forgets about his ailing mother or that he neglects his friends or family, but perhaps the opposite - all of these people are constants. Even the character Grandma Lausch, who lived with Augie, his brothers and mother during his childhood as a matriarch and renter, even after her death she lives in in his brother. As his brother Simon dawns the mask of the up-and-coming businessman and future husband to a millionare's daughter his social interaction mimic the patterns of Grandma Lausch. Even if Simon wanted to be rid of Grandma Lausch he could not. His history is unshakeable. Something about the dead lives on.

It is not binding inheritance of earthly power that lives on. In fact, I would venture to say that Simon was bound to shake the poverty he was born into by one means or another. Perhaps this was due to Simon's disposition to be a good student and Grandma Lausch's determiniation to "make something" of these boys. Really it would be hard to say what the cause of a particilar fate, even in a novel, might be. Much is mysterious to the reader if he/she wants to begin this kind of archeology, after all, the novel is self-contained and holds all of the keys inside. Some doors are kept locked.

If I am to take it that the boredom or some other kind of suffering is the manifestation of an unknown craving or love with Augie March because of the key given to the reader by the narrator (which I believe is an older Augie) I'll be wise to attend to the boredoms and pains of the characters in the book. But that's not what really intrigues me about this quote.