Today’s snowfall, which is keeping me indoors, just made me pick up Bellow’s Letters. It begins with an amazing excerpt from his 1977 Jefferson Lecture:
On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face….what form could a higher development take? All you could say was that you accepted this condition as a gambler would accept absurd odds, as a patient accepted his rare disease. In a city of four million people, no more than a dozen had caught it. The only remedy for it was to read and write stories and novels.
