Seize the Day Essay

In the following excerpt, Cynthia Ozick explores Bellow's Seize the Day as a link to higher consciousness.

When Seize the Day first appeared, the old system was fully at work. Ah! How to describe it? Hunger, public hunger; and then excitement, argument, and, among writers, the wildly admiring disturbances of envy. A new book by Bellow! You lived by it, you absorbed it, you took it into your system....

There was ... another element in Bellow's prose-in the coloration of his mind-that could not be immediately detected, because it contradicted a taken-for-granted sentiment about human character: that the physical body is simply a shell for the nature hidden within, that what I look like is not what I truly am, that my disposition is masked by the configuration of my features. The American infatuation with youth tends to support this supposition: a very young face is a sort...