Thursday Q and A

Saul Bellow

Mr. Bellow, in the end, was there any sense to be made of such concerted artistic approaches to life such as your own?

"As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities: to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near."