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The thousands of my fans here at goodreads.com must know by now that I spent a great part of my childhood and early teen years in an island facing the Pacific Ocean (see my review of "Timbuktu" by Paul Auster). when I was around ten years old, a word was invented there, most likely by a close relative of mine named Aputuy (though I'm not sure of this as he may have picked it up also from someone else). I do not know how that word is spelled, but I'll write it here by the way it sounds: POO-CHOOT (the OOs like in choo-choo train). Around 40 years after I first heard it, people in my small town still knows what a poo-choot is.

There were a lot of poo-choots in my town. Then, and even now. They are those (in almost all cases I know, male, most of them unmarried) who do not do anything productive. They don't work. A poo-choot's daily routine goes something like this: he wakes up in the morning (some are early risers), eats breakfast (often just bread called "pan de sal" which is dipped into a cup of coffee before he drinks the coffee itself), walks around the town, stays or sits in a sidestreet or street corner when he finds someone to talk to, stays some place if someone offers him a drink, takes his meals (lunch and/or dinner) somewhere in between, sleeps at night, wakes up in the morning the next day and does the same thing again on that day, and the next, and the next.

The poo-choots survive, even with their unproductive lives, because they usually have females in the family working, or they have income from a few hectares of coconut plantations they inherited, or generous relatives (siblings, children, etc.) working out-of-town or abroad. Besides, it takes very little to keep a poo-choot alive. Often, they can also get free meals by dropping by some townspeople's houses during meal times.

"Dangling Man" is the story of Saul Bellow's poo-choot. Written like a journal, the first entry is for December 15, 1942. Joseph, a Chicago resident, has resigned from his regular job and is waiting to be drafted into the Army and fight in the war. His wife, Iva (they were chldless), continues to work and they live off Iva's meager salary. Seven months had passed, but Joseph is still waiting to be inducted into the Army. With nothing to do, he "dangles." He decides to write a journal to record his thoughts and feelings as a "dangling man," with a life he calls a--

"derangement of days, the leveling of occasions...days (which) have lost their distinctiveness. There were formerly baking days, washing days, days that began events and days that ended them. But now they are undistinguished, all equal, and it is difficult to tell Tuesday from Saturday. When (he neglects) to look carefully at the newspaper (he does) not know what day it it. If (he guesses) Friday and then learn that it is actually Thursday, (he does) not experience any great pleasure in having won twenty-four hours."

He recalls a friend who draws cartoon faces for an advertising agency and who has had an exhibition of his drawings in New York which failed (no one bought any of his pieces). Seeing that he has no talent of that sort, and despite his friend's unimpressive accomplishments, he writes that his friend--

"has escaped a trap. That really is a victory to celebrate. I am fascinated by it, and a little jealous. He can maintain himself. Is it because he is an artist? I believe it is. Those acts of the imagination save him. But what about me? I have no talent for that sort of thing. My talent, if I have one at all, is for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically, a good man. Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?"

He writes this inside his room in an apartment he and his wife rents. He continues that his friend "is better of"--

"There he is in New York, painting; and in spite of the calamity, the lies and moral buggery, the odium, the detritus of wrong and sorrow dropped on every heart, in spite of these, he can keep a measure of cleanliness and freedom. Besides, those acts of the imagination are in the strictest sense not personal. Through them he is connected with the best part of mankind. He feels this and he can never be isolated, left aside. He has a community. I have this six-sided box. And goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. I, in this room, separate, alienated, distrustful, find in my purpose not an open world, but a closed, hopeless jail. My perspectives end in the walls. Nothing of the future comes to me. Only the past, in its shabbiness and innocence. Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me."

The poo-choots of our town are, indeed, good men. When I left for college they were there, smiling, wishing me luck. When I returned 20 or so years after, they were still there, older, but still smiling, keeping close, hoping that I treat them to rounds of beer. Keeping themselves in one place, with very little opportunity to do great evil, they approach the end of their lives not having stolen taxpayers' money, or lied to the public to conceal crimes, or facilitated corrupt transactions, wronged people for career advancements, cheated on their wives, or did all the other evil things men do when they reject the option to just "dangle" along. And you wonder, at the end of your own life, who had lived better.