How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Most of the guests at the Hotel Gloriana were past the age of retirement. Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a great part of New York's vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia university, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tearooms, the bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club rooms. (1.2)
Living in Wilhelm's neighborhood must feel something like being surrounded by thousands of Betty Whites, Kirk Douglases, Angela Lansburys, George Takeis, and other magnificent old people. Sign us up!
Quote #2
Some had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California. He himself had been one of those loose objects. (1.50)
There's not a lot of love for Los Angeles in Seize the Day, and whether it's because LA is the place where Wilhelm's life first started to take a nosedive, or whether it's because New York is just better. What do you think? Has the novel got a little bit of an East versus West rivalry going on? We wonder what Katy Perry might have to say about this.
Quote #3
They came into the sunshine of upper Broadway, not clear but throbbing through the dust and fumes, a false air of gas visible at eye level as it spurted from the bursting buses. From old habit, Wilhelm turned up the collar of his jacket. (4.113)
The New York City air is "throbbing" with dust and fumes, and gas is "spurting" from "bursting buses." Just get a load of the extraordinary "body" language that Saul Bellow is using here. Is this pollution gross or what?
Quote #4
Patiently, in the window of the fruit store, a man with a scoop spread crushed ice between his rows of vegetables. There were also Persian melons, lilacs, tulips with radiant black at the middle. The many street noises came back after a little while from the caves of the sky. (5.1)
What does this metaphor suggest to you? Are the "caves of the sky" the spaces in between the tall buildings and skyscrapers, or are they simply the rounded contours of the sky itself? What might each of those possibilities suggest about the city Saul Bellow is trying to describe?
Quote #5
From the carnival of the street—pushcarts, accordion and fiddle, shoeshine, begging, the dust going round like a woman on stilts—they entered the narrow crowded theatre of the brokerage office. From front to back it was filled with the Broadway crowd. (5.3)
The brokerage office is a microcosm of the city itself, packed full of the same carnivalesque cast of characters that Wilhelm sees out on the street. What other buildings/locations in the novel seem like little vignettes of NYC-in-miniature?
Quote #6
"But fifteen grand is not an ambitious figure," Tamkin was telling him. "For that you don't have to wear yourself out on the road, dealing with narrow-minded people. A lot of them don't like Jews, either, I suppose?"
"I can't afford to notice. I'm lucky when I have my occupation. Tamkin, do you mean you can save our money?" (5.21-22)
Wilhelm's evasive response to Dr. Tamkin's question suggests that Tamkin is right: Wilhelm did notice anti-Semitism amongst his customers when he worked for the Rojax Corporation.
Quote #7
He went through the locker-room curtains. Two men wrapped in towels were playing Ping-pong. They were awkward and the ball bounded high. The Negro in the toilet was shining shoes. He did not know Dr. Adler by name, and Wilhelm descended to the massage room. (5.13)
The only Black man we meet in the Seize the Day is nameless, and he shines shoes in the bathroom of a hotel run by Europeans, where every resident seems to be white. What does this suggest about the racial hierarchies in the America the novel depicts?
Quote #8
On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret [. . .] (7.89)
There's that gassy air again. But let's look at the crowd in this passage. Is this a positive depiction of the great "body" of humankind, or does the novel's narrator give this description negative connotations?
Quote #9
The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed and it seemed to Wilhelm to throb at the last limit of endurance. And although the sunlight appeared like a broad tissue, its actual weight made him feel like a drunkard. (7.89)
Okay, so it's hot, and the asphalt on the enormous street is soaking up the sunlight and radiating its heat right back. That's what's happening physically here, but what's happening emotionally? What do these sensations of throbbing heat have to do with Wilhelm's frame of mind? How does his view of the city give us insight into his emotions?