notes from a novel i didn't particularly like all that much

"[In reference to Plato's Symposium] To be human was to be severed, mutilated. Man is incomplete. Zeus is a tyrant. Mount Olympus is a tyranny. The work of humankind in its severed state is to seek the missing half. And after so many generations your true counterpart is simply not to be found. Eros is a compensation granted by Zeus--for possibly political reasons of his own. And the quest for your lost half is hopeless. The sexual embrace gives temporary self-forgetting but the painful knowledge of mutilation is permanent."
-- Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (24)

"We are seeking the other that is part of oneself." [Socrates-->Aristophanes]

[Poetics] "a tragic hero has to be above average in height."

"Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man's examined life can make him wish he was dead." (34)

"According to certain thinkers, all men were enemies; they feared and hated one another. There was a war against all, in the state of nature. Sartre has told us in one of his plays that hell is 'the others'--Abe detested Sartre, by the way, and despised his ideas." (42)

"Nothing is more bourgeois than the fear of death." (44)

With the help of Eros we go on looking for our other half: "Eros was a daimon, one's genius or demon provided by Zeus as a compensation for the cruel breaking up of the original androgynous human whole." (82)

"A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him." (85)

"The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment--a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress." (120)

"The strong state--and this is what he learned from Socrates--comes to us through nature. At the core of the soul is Eros. Eros is overwhelmingly attracted to the sun." (120)

"The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature." (132)

"Ravelstein had come to agree that it was important to note how people looked. Their ideas are not enough--their theoretical convictions and political views. If you don't take into account their haircuts, the hang of their pants, their taste in shirts and blouses, their style of driving a car or eating a dinner, your knowledge is incomplete." (136)