"He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so stirred by these letters that from the end of June he moved from place to place with a valise full of papers....Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives, and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally to the famous dead....
[He] had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends....The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed, his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything--everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative--he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear--longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all....
Considering his entire life, he realized that he had mismanaged everything--everything."
--Saul Bellow, Herzog
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