Rereading Herzog
Herzog is not even one of my favorite Bellows (those would be Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and The Dean’s December—two of which are included in the latest Bellow volume from Library of America) but now that I’m reading it again after many years I’m rediscovering some wonderful passages. I thought I would tweet this favorite sentence, and discovered that it’s exactly 140 characters:
There is a distant garden where curious objects grow, and there, in a lovely dusk of green, the heart of Moses E. Herzog hangs like a peach.
Here is Herzog on his way to Martha’s Vineyard:
In the mild end of the afternoon, later, at the waterside in Woods Hole, waiting for the ferry, he looked through the green darkness at the net of bright reflections on the bottom. He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him. There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam. Herzog sighed and said to himself, “Praise God—praise God.” His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines.
And here he is watching some demolition in New York City (on the same page where his heart hangs like a peach):
At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage. Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw strips of molding like javelins.

