Learning how to read and appreciate imaginative literature takes years and exemplifies the importance of delayed gratification. It may help us succeed on this planet. It may lead to or underlie the wisdom of the ages. But can it give us what Harold Bloom, the nonpareil reader and literary critic, terms the "blessing of more life"?
It is no secret that we live in an age of sound-bites, low attention spans, tweets, texts, more than a little bit of big data, where Andy Warhol's alleged 15 minutes of fame have turned into 60 seconds or fewer of infamy -- enough time, for most, to produce and consume a sex video; to read the hateful rant of a web manifesto; to listen to and/or watch the manipulative formulas of a reality broadcast.
Since so few of us still take the time to nurture our brains and souls by reading literary fiction and nonfiction, we are not only losing our ability to think and communicate clearly; we also may be, in the view of Bloom, contributing to violence!
That is one of the typically audacious and brilliant theories put forth by Professor Bloom in his latest book, The Daemon Knows.
As Bloom, who turns 85 today, puts it, "We have a need to heal violence, whether from without or from within. Our strongest writers...can meet that imaginative poverty and help protect the individual mind and society from themselves. I now have come to see that as the highest use of literature for our way of life."
Reading books is and always has been a difficult pleasure, not a "transient joy" in the words of Bob Dylan.
Reading requires a depth of love, a true commitment. That is particularly true when one reads the great, canonical writers (The Daemon Knows focuses on the American Sublime, twelve writers including Emerson, Whitman, Melville and Hart Crane, Bloom's favorite poet, as he has often said and as he confirmed for me a year ago in New Haven).
In The Daemon Knows, Bloom returns to many of these favorites, whom he has discussed at length in books like The Best Poems of the English Language, The Western Canon and Genius.
At this point, on Professor Bloom's birthday, more than a month after the publication of The Daemon Knows, I do not intend to critique the book, which was well-reviewed in many places, including on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Book Review by Cynthia Ozick.
I simply wish to celebrate Bloom, an aging marvel, and to point out that the Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work going back to his first book, on Shelley, in the 1950s.
There is of course Bloom's well-known theory about influence, in which, if I may be simplistic, he mapped the Oedipal complex onto Western literature, positioning Milton as the poetic father figure. Then there was Bloom's theory about Shakespearean "overhearing," in which Bloom argued that the Bard's greatest characters like Rosalind, Cleopatra, Hamlet and Falstaff hear themselves speak and change their behavior; in this theory, Bloom boldly declared that Shakespeare, in being the first writer to create such a level of consciousness in his characters, "invented the human."
In his latest book, The Daemon Knows, Bloom writes of the critical role played by the daemon, the genius, the inner glow, the Muse at the heart of every sublime writer.
Bloom, who has been in poor health in recent years, reportedly has said that The Daemon Knows may be his "penultimate" effort as a literary critic.
If that is so, we will miss him and his colorful and prescient musings.
As I wrote a year ago on the occasion of his 84th birthday, Bloom, who for decades has taught a seminar at Yale titled "Shakespeare & Originality," is as original as any Shakespearean character. Many have compared him to Falstaff, but as I pointed out in my tribute last year, Professor Bloom can evidence the cantankerousness of Lear.
He can lash out not only at those he has dubbed the School of Resentment, politically correct foes with multicultural agendas, but also at some of his friends, who revere him.
Of course, he has been through and seen so much, as the photo of him on the dust jacket of his new book, The Daemon Knows, attests. In that photo, Bloom, with an open collar and wearing a longshoreman's sweater, leans against and in the midst of Greco-Roman statuary, presumably on the Yale campus.
He has a characteristic expression on his face. It is the face not only of a world-weary veteran, etched with the traumas and battles of the past.
It is also the face of perseverance, of a man who has never stopped reading, never stopped writing (including the Bloom's Notes series for Chelsea House Press, Bloom has authored thousands of books), never stopped fighting.
It may be the face of Tennyson's Ulysses, who proclaims, "Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
Like Ulysses, Lear and Falstaff, Bloom has been in combat and "seen many a young man die on a battlefield," as he told my class years ago.
But he is better known for his clashes with literary rivals over the Western canon than he is for his military service in Israel during various wars.
Some have accused Professor Bloom of being a dinosaur, of championing primarily dead white men.
They are wrong.
In his book, Genius, Bloom hailed Cervantes, arguably the greatest Spanish or Latino writer ever, as one of the most sublime voices in the canon. Bloom often alludes to the uniqueness of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
As Bloom writes in The Daemon Knows, "Ahab and Whitman are our Great Originals, our contribution to that double handful or so among whom Falstaff and Sancho Panza, Hamlet and Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and Becky Sharp take their place."
To those who have bashed Professor Bloom for including no writers of color and only one woman, Emily Dickinson, in his latest book, let me point out first of all that The Daemon Knows is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the twelve best writers in the English language or in Western literature.
It is a list of twelve of the most sublime American writers, and it ends with Hart Crane, who passed away in 1932, two years after Harold Bloom was born.
This is a young country, not yet 250 years old, and Bloom has focused on the first 150 or so of those years.
Still, we have produced many great artists of color, particularly in more recent decades, who have enriched the life of Harold Bloom.
When I saw Professor Bloom last summer, he was not in good health. He used a walker to help him navigate his way around his house.
But his mind was as sharp and Olympian as ever. We spoke of his love for jazz. When I mentioned that I had heard that he is a fan of Charlie Parker, he said that was true, but he pointed out that his favorites also include Charles Mingus and Bud Powell.
Besides his passion for be-bop, whose creators and virtuosos were all black, Bloom has long touted the prose of the late Ralph Ellison, whose writing soared during and in sync with the be-bop period.
Perhaps, readers have forgotten this because they have not read Bloom closely. But no one should ever forget that Professor Bloom posited in The Book of J, a best-seller, his beautiful theory that the J writer, the most luminous, original and daring of the writers of the Bible, was a woman, perhaps Bathsheba.
And Bloom backed up his assertion with his fabled ear, his exquisite auditory aesthetic, which is attuned not only to the rhythm of modern English, but also to that of ancient Hebrew, a language Bloom learned as a little boy.
Harold Bloom clearly reveres the sublime wherever he can find it, whether the writer happens to be male, female, LGBT, white, Latino, Asian, African-American or anything else.
Bloom's only principle has been to seek out and champion writers of the highest cognitive, aesthetic and imaginative gifts.
This has been the case since he wrote his first books on the Romantic poets.
Bloom is also now properly giving credit to the daemon, the Muse, the inner genius.
He has dedicated his latest book to three people, his wife, Jeanne, as well as John T. Irwin and the "outrageous Bricuth."
He has placed his wife first, at the top of the page.
One wonders if Mrs. Bloom has been Professor Bloom's Muse, his daemon, over the decades. If so, that encourages us all and reminds us, as Bloom points out, in Shelley's words, that the "function of the sublime" is to "abandon easier for more difficult pleasures."
Happy Birthday, Professor Bloom, and many more! May you be granted your wish of more life. You already have the blessing.