But even Oedipus eventually saw the light (or so Sophocles tells us — you decide). Somewhere in my freshman year of college, my mind, thankfully, began to close a little and the world started to open up. I was on the slow boat to recovery . . . and then calamity struck. A “friend” lent me his copy of Bellow’s “Herzog.”

If ever there was a candidate for strict Congressional oversight, it is this cunning little book. Moses Herzog is a professor in the full throes of midlife crisis who writes countless letters to the famous literary and intellectual dead. These scintillating one-sided exchanges, in which Herzog quotes and spars with the great minds of Western civilization, made me feel that I was mastering life as I read them, just as a budding music historian might have the delusion that he was mastering the piano simply by listening to a sonata by Beethoven.

In fact, as I discovered many years later, Bellow was joking. What he wanted to demonstrate, in the figure of poor Herzog, was the utter ineffectuality of the most potent ideas. Thanks for letting me know, pal. Since nobody at the time bothered to let me in on all the fun, I finished “Herzog” as, well, Herzog. At job interviews, I assured prospective employers of my immunity to distraction by affectionately invoking Artistotle’s observation that copulation makes all animals sad. To puzzled women on dates, I expatiated on Hegel and Sombart. “What’s wrong?” one girl asked me as we stared into each other’s eyes and I smiled ruefully. “Oh nothing,” I said. “Spinoza associated desire with disconnected thinking — that’s all.”

And so it went, just like that, reaching the high point of absurdity when I applied for a job at a publication called The Social Register, thinking that it was a socialist magazine.

I had been reading Gramsci by way of Silone by way of Engels on the Manchester working class. So enthusiastic had I become about the sweeping inexorabilities of dialectical materialism that I neglected to pick up an actual, material copy of The Social Register. Grando mistako. If I had, I would have seen that it was not a socialist magazine at all, but a comprehensive directory of America’s high society. My interviewer, a pleasant, 40-ish man in a rumpled white shirt and tie, sat in his Fifth Avenue office and listened politely, his lip curling ever so slightly, to my reflections on hegemony, slave consciousness and “boring from within.” He even walked me to the door.

I hope you are at least partly convinced by the power of my examples. Somehow, we’ve been sold a bill of goods about how literature empowers us. But the idea that great literature can improve our lives in any way is a con as old as culture itself. The University of Chicago’s Great Books course? Think Tammany Hall. “Willing suspension of disbelief”? Code for: distract him while I lift his wallet. The government regulates drugs, alcohol and (finally) bad lending practices. How long can we continue to allow the totally laissez-faire dissemination of literature? Not even a warning from the surgeon general or the attorney general, or some sort of general, on the back of every book?

It was years before I realized that if life is a voyage of sorts then the best thing to do is to keep busy in the depths of your little boat — your life — polishing, tuning, cleaning, repairing the engine that is your own inborn strength, without regard to extraneous aids in the form of culture. Facing it, always facing it, that’s the only way to get through.

O.K., I got all that from Conrad. The fact is that “facing it” has gotten me into trouble, too. I tell you, these people are hard to shake.