I'm reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March right now, and it's affecting me in some ways I hadn't thought it would, or could. Bellow's one hell of a writer ... he just comes at the impact in a vastly different way than a lot of other authors might.

As a result, it took me a long time to really get into the story ... to get my heart behind the characters and to really jive with the narrative, if you'll forgive that expression.

But I'm so, so glad that I did.

I read this tonight, and it spoke to me. Perhaps it'll speak to somebody else. Perhaps not:

“Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind—mere humanity.

But then with everyone going around so capable and purposeful in his strong handsome case, can you let yourself limp in feeble and poor, some silly creature, laughing and harmless? No, you have to plot in your heart to come out differently. External life being so almighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can’t get justice and he can’t give justice, but he can live. This is what mere humanity always does. It’s made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that’s what their power is. There’s one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world—with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies—becomes the actuality. That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your versions of what’s real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and flowers of a version.

I certainly looked like an ideal recruit. But the invented things never became real for me no matter how I urged myself to think they were.
My real fault was that I couldn’t stay with my purest feelings. This was what tore the greatest hole in me.”

Maybe we're all just struggling, in our own separate ways--separate, but yet similar in our struggles--to stay with our purest feelings. To eventually learn, through trial and error and pains, how to stop those holes from tearing away at our fabric. To hold true to the chords of beauty that make us want to act out the best within ourselves, even if doing so looks insurmountable at times.