“I do not believe that history obeys a system, nor that its so-called laws permit deducing future or even present forms of society; but rather that to become conscious of the relativity (hence of the arbitrariness) of any feature of our culture is already to shift it a little, and that history (not the science but its object) is nothing other than a series of such imperceptible shifts.”

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America

* * * * *

At the end—the end of the novel, which, as we know, can be the beginning of almost anything—Herzog feels something, perhaps happiness, something at least that “produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce orange, as grass green, as birds heat.” Feeling, after all his adventures that spring and early summer, “pretty well satisfied to be,” and with “fullness of heart,” Herzog lies down, by turns, on mattress, under locust tree and on old dusty couch, expectant.

I feel the same sense of intensity and fullness this summer morning beginning a new book, Reimagining Thoreau, by Robert Milder (Cambridge University Press). Expectant, because Milder’s recent study of Herman Melville, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, is one of the finest things I’ve ever read about how a writer’s words come alive, not by giving us an idea to carry away, but by immersing us in the indeterminacy of all ideas—true, an “idea” itself, but one consistent with the general scatter of things human. On life’s ocean we tack to and fro, an island moving in the stream, occasionally finding the isolated Ishmael afloat on his own idea’s island.

Milder’s theme in Reimagining Thoreau, as I absorb it in the first pages, is that Henry David Thoreau‘s “writings are dramatized answers to the social and psychological problem of how to live.” And these were “strategic” answers, the probing initiatives of Thoreau and others who formed that famous American Renaissance literary class which sought to “rescue itself from the margins of national life,” and to reshape the world “according to the imperatives of personal and collective need.” Of course we reshape the world in part by reshaping ourselves and thus our relations with the world. Thoreau’s shapeshifting was in response to “unexpected resistances in nature, society, and his own being.” Resistances to his idealized or mythologized self, a self-conception always in flux. So Thoreau was “a Proteus who eluded tragedy, chronic frustration, remorse and despair through a sidelong change of form” that repeatedly infused new energy into his work. A bracing thought this cool July morning!

It’s academic criticism, usually the mature reading of fall or winter, but seems perfect just now, as visions of change dance in our heads. I hunker down in this outpost of our intellectual history: the what, read where and when, that tells our story. What is imagined in Milder’s analysis is recapitulated by us as readers. It’s a writer’s way of acting in the world, imagining a character – fictional or historical – acting in the world. It’s the reader’s way, too. It’s the mind’s energy scattering, taking root in a new island’s soil, creating an imperceptible shift among the native flora and fauna.

Which is how my thoughts turn to an old friend, Herzog, at the peak of his summer.

“You have a strange influence on people,” Moses Herzog’s brother Will tells him. Out of all of Saul Bellow’s heroes – those varied alter(ed) egos, including Augie March, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King, and even the strange opposite, the gifted Humboldt – it is Herzog who steps off the page for me, who writes charged letters to me, the same as the ones he writes to friends, the famous dead and God in the novel that bears his name, Herzog. I’ll drop in on Herzog anytime, anywhere, as he walks around New York or visits his daughter in Chicago, but I love him best in the country.

In the novel’s final pages, Herzog’s brief sojourn to his country house in the Berkshires is the equivalent of Thoreau’s environmental experiment in his cabin on the shore at Walden Pond. Herzog’s house, purchased with his “dead father’s dollars, ugly green, laboriously made, tediously counted,” is the one place in his life where he finds “the air light, the stream quick, the woods dense, the green new.” At some level his self-sufficiency and solitude – the terrible loneliness and the delicious joy of it – represent recompense for modern “economy,” life in labor and money and melancholy – in Thoreau’s terms, “Where I lived, and what I lived for.”

Just as the experience of Walden is not really life in a shack by a pond, our own experience of nature is not a summer camping trip at the beach, a hike on a well-trod path through a wilderness area, or a weekend retreat at a hot springs. Most of it is in thought, the mental calculation of global warming, last trees standing or diminished quality of life. The TV screen is our window on preservation’s dioramas, the last best places, harassed and shrinking. Most of us know nature in the tastelessness of tomatoes and the look of the dry-stemmed dead bonsai in the corner on the porch. Bellow’s novel was written in 1964, on the cusp of another era’s tinker’s damn of change. And it rings its own changes on that old familiar tune: America, arise! Reform yourself, reform the world!

Herzog’s is a life of noisy desperation. Its disintegrating tumble – failed marriages, lover’s quarrels and writer’s block – matches the condition of his house, dilapidated and in disarray. To ward off further decomposition he must dig in and “hammer, paint, patch, slice, prune, spray.” It’s a physical and intellectual sandpapering that’s called for.

Bellow is too citified to have a true ruralist vision. But his hero Herzog has a keen mind, and it is his obsessive, minute empirical observation that triggers a spiritual renewal of sorts. He notes the rats and field mice; the wrens, orioles, thrushes, crows and barn owls; the grubs, ants, beetles, grasshoppers and long-legged spiders. He catalogs the weeds and vines and trees: catalpa-bells, honeysuckle, wild onions, raspberries, locust and maple seedlings, roses, mulberry trees, giant elm and great spruces with their “beautiful jaggedness.” Herzog has Thoreau’s keen classifying eye for detritus, too, the silt of life, the “webs, cocoons, and insect corpses, the small beaked skulls of dead birds, the owls and their nest litter,” the “straws, wool threads, down, bits of flesh (mouse ends), and streaks of excrement.”

Herzog’s spiritual life is an ironic shadow economy. His melancholy is the “by-product of his laboring brain.” When Nature and Herzog are “alone together” in the Berkshires, it is his “unemployed consciousness” that worms through the dilemmas of modern life.

Herzog rejects modern power systems, busy about the making of corpses. He despises the lure of extreme cases – apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings – and the cry that it is “a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end.” Millenarianism and paranoia are manipulated by comfortable folks playing at crisis with “shivery games” and the “praise of suffering.” Herzog will accept suffering, but not praise it.

For Herzog the human intellect is “one of the great forces of the universe,” the equivalent of the “green new” of burgeoning nature, and a challenge to endless space, the cold fire of stars, the “gas – minerals, heat, atoms” of creation. Herzog achieves a delicate country balance. He’s tranquil, radiant, forgetful, earnest. “Open my heart,” he says. I’ll take what comes. “We owe a human life to this waking spell of existence, regardless of the void.”

Herzog, on his dusty couch, sparks an imperceptible shift.