Mysticism is having a moment. A number of recent books by philosophers explore the topic, or related topics, with sympathy, including James K.A. Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark (2026), Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners (2026), Simon Critchley’s Mysticism (2024), and Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections (2024). And it’s not just academic philosophers: Michael Pollan’s quest to understand consciousness led him, in A World Appears (2026), to affirm “some thrilling remainder of mystery” about our experience of the world, and Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her remarkable memoir Will and Attention (2026), reflects with sympathy on female Christian mystics. In fiction, Jon Fosse’s towering, hypnotic Septology (2022) is, in some ways, an enactment of mystical experience, and Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard Devotional (2025) a kind of preparation for it. Christian Wiman continues to inhabit both a contemplative and a mystical space in books such as Zero at the Bone (2023) and essays such as “The Tune of Things” in Harper’s (2025), while Rod Dreher concludes his Living in Wonder (2024) with a chapter titled “The Urgency of the Mystical.” Even Adam Gopnik’s most recent book, The Real Work (2023), doesn’t hesitate to describe accomplished immersion in a craft or a task as “a mystical feeling—the mystical feeling, actually.”
I read this modest trend, at least in part, as a protest against the overstimulation of our device-driven lives, a quieting of the storm of noise-as-information, and even a refusal of disenchantment as a description of our world. I hear these voices holding on not just to our humanity (achievement enough these days) but also to the idea that human life is embedded in conditions that are ultimately mysterious, that this mystery is worthy of our attention and awe, and that there is something about the reality we humans inhabit that is not replicable by the machines that now imitate our speech. For all that, mysticism is not an argument about our current state or even our ways of knowing. It is more like prayer than prophecy, more like art than algorithm. Simon Critchley observed that the goal of reading the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart was not, in fact, to advance understanding but instead to let Eckhart have an effect on you. If mysticism is having a moment, it is surely because some of us are hungry for effects that an optimized, rational, technocratic world is helpless to provide—and actively works against.
This tributary of interest in the broad idea of the mystical makes it a good time to revisit a novel whose approach to these same concerns is vivid and unique. Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, first published in 1975, eschews the mystic’s usual formula and treats a spiritual realm as a deadly serious subject embedded in a freewheeling comic setting. Long before the agitations of our screen-addict present, decades before the cottage industry of books about the attention economy, Bellow was calling out the impact of modern distractions and overstimulation. Imagine our consciousness as a territory to be settled, he once wrote, and then imagine an “Oklahoma land rush” staking out its frantic claims. That land rush has become, for us, a bank run. Bellow titled a late essay “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About.” Having, in our day, given ourselves away to the kinds of agitations he feared, we can benefit from rereading Bellow at the height of his own distracted powers. The uniqueness, and I think surprise, of his freestyle mysticism is that it’s suffused with so much affirmation. Mysticism’s usual register is negation, but Bellow’s is full of life and love. Mysticism’s ecstasy offers an escape from the world; Bellow’s mysticism is an expansive feeling of the world.
The mid-1970s arguably represented the high-water mark of Bellow’s spiritual explorations. In Humboldt’s Gift, the narrator, Charlie Citrine, is a student of the esoteric writings of Rudolf Steiner, whose system, anthroposophy, Bellow was busy exploring at the time. In 1975, the year Humboldt was published, Bellow began a kind of acolyte’s correspondence with the British academic Owen Barfield, Steiner’s most important champion, who shared Bellow’s interests in the poetic imagination and a living spiritual realm. Bellow read Barfield’s work, sought him out, and for a time viewed him as an important (if somewhat condescending) mentor. Bellow’s engagement with Barfield, and with an anthroposophy group in Chicago, coincided with the publication of Humboldt’s Gift, the novel that earned Bellow his only Pulitzer, in 1976, the same year he won the Nobel Prize. Bellow’s Nobel speech joins his spiritual explorations to his artistic creed:
There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us, and we will be left with nothing but a “terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”
The dynamic Bellow describes here is more than poetic inspiration itself (what happens inside and to the writer). It is also a description of this other reality, “the genuine one,” that the writer has access to in glimpses. It’s worth lingering with Bellow’s attempt to elaborate in an expository way before plunging into the lyrical landscape of his fiction. The speech goes on with earnestness:
This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes. We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language is inadequate, and because few people are willing to risk the embarrassment. They would have to say, “There is a spirit,” and that is taboo. So almost everyone keeps quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it…. The value of literature lies in these intermittent “true impressions.” A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world, from which these “true impressions” come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang on to so tenaciously—in the face of evil, so obstinately—is no illusion.
Mystical accounts, even passing mystical glimpses of the kind Bellow describes, are famously hard to report. Even more, they own that inaccessibility. Pascal sewed a fragmented description of his mystical experience into the lining of his coat, where it could remind him of his transformation without attempting an explanation that other people could grasp. William James, ever generous toward mystical accounts, noted, nonetheless, the limitations of reporting and assessing their claims: “This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else.” All this is why the novel feels like exactly the right form for exploring mystery and mysticism. Novels don’t settle cosmic arguments. They enact and explore every aspect of what humans believe and do. Wisdom and folly have equal standing. The novel postpones questions about whether and how mystical experiences can even be real. Instead, it enacts those experiences and puts pressure on them to see what they then do. Bellow does this too, but his genius was to embed mysticism in comedy, to surround it with folly, and yet still somehow show it as deeply serious and humane.
One of the first things that strikes a reader of Bellow is his famously shifting registers: the high and low culture, intellectual thought and street speech, academic style and vernacular, “putting Coney Island into the Aegean,” as one of his characters says, and uniting “Buffalo Bill and Rasputin.” Philip Roth called this teeming, shifting dynamic the Bellovian “glide.” That glide creates a sense that Bellow is at the same time a serious thinker and a comic fool. His novels are circus and agora and reading room at once. He fills these boundary-free spaces with rushing modern life and with what he calls, in Humboldt’s Gift, higher-thought clowns. For the reader of Bellow, the challenge is sorting those registers—or riding them artfully.
Because he exposes the chronic helplessness of his thinkers, it’s tempting to read Bellow as making light of intellectual life. His characters say things like, “the unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life will get you in the neck.” But it’s misguided thinking, intellectual overconfidence and intellectual systems, not the life of the mind itself, that Bellow targets in his fiction. When the narrator of Humboldt’s Gift quips, “I knew everything I was supposed to know and nothing I really needed to know,” he is still on a quest for knowledge. Bellow’s characters are impatient and chastened, but never cynical. Their beliefs are disappointed, not deconstructed. His characters don’t flee to monasteries. The urge toward Bellow’s version of the mystical is not an anti-intellectual turn.
Bellow’s genius was to embed mysticism in comedy, to surround it with folly, and yet still somehow show it as deeply serious and humane.
How does he do all this? How is his mysticism not an escape from the world? How is mysticism, which always reminds us that language is inadequate to describe its experience, actually brought to life in torrents of language? Maybe most importantly, how does it happen that a writer so attentive to the physicality of his characters and the details of the world can offer suggestions and hints and personal impressions of a reality that somehow transcends that physicality?
At least part of the answer is that the physical, for Bellow, is a vehicle for the mystical. This is why he describes his characters as lavishly as he does. He observes and describes his “thought-clowns” in order to see them differently, and so to see the world differently through them. For instance, his literary portrait of Allan Bloom in Ravelstein (2000) is not an exposé of Ravelstein’s thinking but a profile of the embedded and embodied life that surrounds his thinking: the quirks, the stuttering tics, the obliviousness, the materialism, the ego, the secrecy, the contradictions, and, importantly, the physical shape and feel of the man himself. Physicality reveals something nonphysical and essential. His portraiture probes the character as much as it depicts the features.
None of this is descriptive performance. Bellow may be, as his own character puts it, sweeping up the world in his perceptions like jacks, but the energy is not play. It is love. Bellow loves his characters (and the world) despite their foolishness and disappointments. His is a visceral, deep, affectionate, rooted attachment, full of immigrant nostalgia and what he calls in Herzog “potato love.” Even minor characters get the full Bellovian portraiture. It is as if Bellow is blind, and he has to put his probing hands all over the world to “see it feelingly,” as Gloucester puts it in King Lear. Every description assembles affection, and the sensing, the perception itself, moves Bellow in an almost mystical way. When circling the physical impression of the lawyer Alec Szathmar in Humboldt, the Bellovian glide is on full display:
He had gained weight after his coronary, when he should have thinned down. Always a conservative dresser he tried to cover his broad can with double-vented jackets. So he looked like a giant thrush. The exceedingly human face of this bird was framed with stormy white sideburns. The warm brown eyes full of love and friendship were not especially honest. One of C.G. Jung’s observations helped me to make sense of Szathmar. Some minds, said Jung, belong to earlier periods of history. Among our contemporaries there are Babylonians and Carthaginians or types from the Middle Ages. To me Szathmar was an eighteenth-century cavalryman, a follower of Pandour von Trenck, the cousin of my lucky Trenck. His padded swarthy cheeks, his Roman nose, his mutton-chop whiskers, his fat chest wide hips neat feet and virile cleft chin attracted women. Whom women will embrace is one of the unfathomable mysteries. But of course the race has to keep going.
This portrait, full of imagery and slang, erudite historical associations and gratuitous social commentary, is also, and mostly, animated by love. “My feeling for Szathmar,” the passage goes on, “was after all family feeling.”
The physical, for Bellow, is a vehicle for the mystical.
Bellow gives the same treatment to the gangster Cantabile, Charlie Citrine’s adversary and foil. Again, the vividness of the physical incites a nonphysical awareness: “His nose was particularly white and his large nostrils, correspondingly dark, reminded me of an oboe when they dilated. People so distinctly seen have power over me. But I don’t know which comes first, the attraction or the close observation. When I feel gross, dull, damaged in sensibility, a refined perception, coming suddenly, has great influence.” We thrill to the image of nostrils as oboe holes—at least some writers can do something of that—but what other novelist experiences that physical vividness mystically?
In his late and mournful short story “By the St. Lawrence,” Bellow explicitly describes his lifelong attention to physical detail as an expression of metaphysical connection. At one point, his narrator, Rexler, looks back to childhood, remembering an aunt and a cousin: “She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he visited Lachine he shared Albert’s bed, and in the morning he would sometimes stroke Albert’s head, and not even when Albert fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew in close rows, row after row.” The sweeping assertion of love overriding character flaws resolves in the tender repetition of a physical observation: the hair in close rows, row after row.
But it’s what follows that turns this passage, for me, into a kind of end-of-career elaboration of what Bellow tried to communicate in the Nobel speech about impressions. It reads like an elegy: “These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life—his being—and love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul.” The parallel poetry here is lovely, even calming: the hair in “close rows, row after row,” the traits themselves “paired, pair by pair.” In another late story, “Something to Remember Me By,” the young narrator tries to take in the bustle of a family wake. Absorbing details, he gives up trying to recount them, and simply says, in a line that also feels like a summary of all of Bellow, “I saw and I saw and I saw.”
These rushes of perception, though, are not artistic accounts. They don’t simply paint a scene. They contain something vibrating. They mobilize love—or maybe it’s the other way around: “love was what produced” the perceptions. Bellow sees and sees because he feels and feels. And he is shameless about this emotional philosophy or emotional aesthetic in a way that feels alien now. Today we view our emotions as contained inside social and biological and biographical frameworks. A little theory and some psychotherapy can unpack and sort them. Our ideologies breezily channel them. Our chatbots advise them. But Bellow’s feelings of love and gratitude are metaphysical ruptures. When he perceives, something walks “back and forth, in and out of his soul.” In describing these perceptions, Bellow’s language is heightened, even effusive. Seeing an elderly man who used to board with the narrator’s family when he was a child, Charlie Citrine notes that “an emotional estuary … opened up in me when I laid eyes on Waldemar Wald.” Later, visiting his older brother, Charlie is even more expansive: “Late noon stood like a wall of gold. And a mass of love was between us, and neither Ulick nor I knew what to do with it.”
The ruptures of connection that produce feelings of love are, for Bellow, a kind of knowledge, or at least a suggestion or an open question about the world. “True knowledge is supposed to be a monopoly of the scientific world view,” he notes elsewhere in Humboldt’s Gift. “But human beings have all sorts of knowledge. They don’t have to apply for the right to love the world.” Riding a train out of New York’s Grand Central Station, Bellow’s Herzog recalls childhood train rides with his family, his father peeling pears for the children with a pearl-handled knife, his mother wiping his face with a handkerchief she moistens. “All children have cheeks,” Herzog observes, “and all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. These things either matter or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is.” This question about the universe and our relationship to it occupies all of Bellow’s work. His heightened perceptions come to him as a form of intense, often nostalgic love, but also as a suggestion of a spiritual reality. Ultimately, Bellow believes in another realm because, for him, love requires it.
Bellow’s feelings of love and gratitude are metaphysical ruptures.
Bellow’s characters also make metaphysical assertions and take philosophical leaps. It’s not all potato love and lyrical glide. In Humboldt’s Gift, the leap is an inverted theodicy. Instead of rejecting the idea of a spiritual realm because the world’s relentless suffering discounts the notion of God, Bellow finds human life so full of wonder and even transcendence that it requires something to lie beyond it: “on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever.”
The task, then, is to show that the human soul is extraordinary. A devoted reader of Blake and Wordsworth, a hesitant pilgrim in the realm of esoteric anthroposophy, Bellow grounds his own metaphysical claims in his voracious apprehension of the world. Where most mysticism involves some form of negation and abnegation, the heart of Bellow’s spirituality is plenitude. When at the end of the novel Charlie Citrine encounters the old boarder from his childhood, he isn’t just moved emotionally. The effect of the encounter affirms something true about the world:
I was thinking that life was a hell of a lot more bounteous than I had ever realized. It rushed over us with more than our senses and our judgment could take in. One life with its love affairs, its operatic ambitions, its dollars and horse races and marriage-designs and old people’s homes is, after all, only a tin dipperful of this superabundance. It rushes up also from within.
For Charlie, this superabundance has to exceed the boundaries of our sensible, natural world:
But why did a kind of faintness come over me at the start of the interview with Uncle Waldemar in the presence of Menasa and Renata? Because there is far more to any experience, connection, or relationship than ordinary consciousness, the daily life of the ego, can grasp. Yes. You see, the soul belongs to a greater, an all-embracing life outside. It’s got to.
Though they are wildly different writers with wildly different temperaments and backgrounds and projects, Bellow’s language anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s persistent arguments about a similar superabundance. “The sheer plenitude of things a mortal encounters,” she writes in What Are We Doing Here? (2018), “is a marvel in itself.”
In the end, while his call is not to faith (Robinson’s terrain) but to imagination, Bellow nonetheless adopts the mystic’s receptiveness to something that transcends our capacities. Of his first great novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Bellow said the book came to him in a rush. He stood there “with buckets to catch it.” This is not an assertion of an inspired genius but a confession of a seeker receiving. For all the out-of-step attitudes that made Bellow frustrating to the generation that followed him, I wonder if it’s precisely this posture that kept David Foster Wallace from grouping Bellow with the writers he dubbed great male narcissists. Bellow’s gratitude for the world overcame his characters’ self-involvement, lifted their gaze. Charlie Citrine again:
Now I was only simmering, still, and it would be necessary at last to come to a full boil. I had business on behalf of the entire human race—a responsibility not only to fulfill my own destiny but to carry on for certain failed friends like Von Humboldt Fleisher who had never been able to struggle through into higher wakefulness. My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.
I know that the contexts for these rhetorical bursts and mystical apprehensions are, in Humboldt’s Gift and other Bellow novels, tremendous strife (marital, financial, legal) and that the release into the mystical might seem like an escape, a breaking of the pressure’s storm. But one of Bellow’s distinctive traits is to put large and long contexts around his struggles. History and the cosmos frame the narratives. He doesn’t refuse these contexts or try to escape them. He loves the bounty of the world too much. The goal, which is forever the mystic’s goal, is, inside the foolishness and the flights and comeuppances of the world, to find rest. Spiritual rest.
It feels impossible to write about Bellow now without some generational and maybe ideological qualifications. I first read Bellow in my twenties, the Reagan eighties. Now I am as old as Bellow was when the Nobel committee made its phone call. I go on rereading him because, as with rereading Melville or Tolstoy, the boundaries of the world seem to expand and the vividness of experience sharpens. I see and I see and I see. But I also wince at some of Bellow’s portrayals of the relationships between women and men, and I struggle with the depiction of the Black pickpocket in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow can be cranky and impatient and ungenerous in his commentary (the Bellovian snide). Later in life, he became associated with a certain kind of cultural chauvinism, most infamously for a comment in an interview (“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow asked. “The Proust of the Papuans?”) and maybe more so for his close friendship with Allan Bloom. In the peak culture war years, Bellow wrote the foreword for Bloom’s side-taking bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. All this has pushed Bellow to the margins of the American canon as currently framed. In 2024, when The Atlantic shared its list of the Great American Novels of the last 100 years, only Augie March made the cut. Humboldt’s Gift, the novel that preceded the Nobel, was omitted. In The Guardian’s recent list of the one hundred best novels in English, there is no Saul Bellow at all. This is a loss for younger readers.
Bellow may be channeling some of his own testy ruminations through his highly educated characters, but he makes these characters thought-clowns rather than counterrevolutionaries. He defrocks his priests, trips his pilgrims, spills coffee on his dandies, exposes arrogance as one more libido trick. And in his fiction anyway, he’s able to ask what is left of us when that kind of humbling happens. His answers move between two paths: one is nostalgia and potato love—the purity he feels for childhood attachment: “What was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog,” the hero of Bellow’s other great unlisted novel. “All he ever wanted was there.” The other answer is the edge of mysticism. “Lately I have become aware,” he wrote to Owen Barfield around the time of the Nobel, “not of illumination itself, but a kind of illuminated fringe—a peripheral glimpse of a different state of things.” Shifting between these modes of perception, Bellow’s questing, self-defeating characters navigate the world comically, hopefully, lovingly. Bellow mobilizes true impressions by engaging with the material spectacle of the country and the folly of human relationships. The urge for plenitude is spiritual even as it is physical. The comedy of the material is concurrent with the metaphysical glimpse.
But if the answers are love and a kind of imaginative mysticism, what is the question or the problem at hand? This is where we’d be smart to put Bellow’s unappealing attitudes into a container, label them and name them, and not miss the larger project because of them. “When the candle is burning,” Annie Dillard wrote in Holy the Firm (1977), “who looks at the wick?” Fifty years ahead of the sudden existential challenge of algorithms we casually call intelligence, Bellow saw that our problem was that we hadn’t figured out how to orient ourselves in a landscape of so much freedom. Shedding stations, customs, manners, norms, and old frameworks for understanding the universe, we were free, yes, but also deeply vulnerable as a consequence. We seemed, to Bellow, outmatched by it all. Humboldt himself went mad. Charlie Citrine sought archangels. All those writers exploring the fringes of mysticism today are likewise, and with good reason, disenchanted with our inherited disenchantment. “They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood,” the defeated Humboldt declared. “Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.”
We need Bellow because our response to the same inherited conditions is often as flat as our screen world. We are analytical and technical. Our educational remedy is to sharpen the knives of critical thinking. But what we need more urgently is expansive thinking, imaginative thinking. We need glimpses of human life inside the largest contexts, including the opaque cosmos. We also need Bellow’s affirmation, his longing for “the whole marvelous thing” to continue. We need to aspire and wonder and love. We don’t need to make strong counterclaims defiantly. We can be content with hopeful claims about the illuminated fringe. But to glimpse that fringe at all, we need writers and seers to go on pointing us in the right direction. We need the company of thought-clowns and seekers. Humboldt’s Gift, half a century later, is a worthy traveling companion.