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We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.

-Harold Bloom

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We Possess The Canon

Harold Bloom

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We Possess The Canon Because We Are Mortal And Also Rather Belated. There Is Only So Much Time, And Time Must Have A Stop, While There Is More To Read Than There Ever Was Before. From The Yahwist And Homer To Freud, Kafka, And Beckett Is A Journey Of Nearly Three Millennia. Since That Voyage Goes Past Harbors As Infinite As Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, And Tolstoy, All Of Whom Amply Compensate A Lifetime's Rereadings, We Are In The Pragmatic Dilemma Of Excluding Something Else Each Time We Read Or Reread Extensively.

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Criticism In The Universities, I'll Have To Admit, Has Entered A Phase Where I Am Totally Out Of Sympathy With 95% Of What Goes On. It's Stalinism Without Stalin.

I Am Naive Enough To Read Incessantly Because I Cannot, On My Own, Get To Know Enough People Profoundly Enough.

Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

In The Finest Critics One Hears The Full Cry Of The Human. They Tell One Why It Matters To Read.

How To Read "harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, Very Quickly, To Begin With, And Perhaps Also To Make An End. Why Read It? Presumably, If You Cannot Be Persuaded To Read Anything Better, Rowling Will Have To Do.

It Is Hard To Go On Living Without Some Hope Of Encountering The Extraordinary.

I Am Not Unique In My Elegiac Sadness At Watching Reading Die, In The Era That Celebrates Stephen King And J.k. Rowling Rather Than Charles Dickens And Lewis Carroll.

What I Think I Have In Common With The School Of Deconstruction Is The Mode Of Negative Thinking Or Negative Awareness, In The Technical, Philosophical Sense Of The Negative, But Which Comes To Me Through Negative Theology.

No Poem, Not Even Shakespeare Or Milton Or Chaucer, Is Ever Strong Enough To Totally Exclude Every Crucial Precursor Text Or Poem.

Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

We Read Not Only Because We Cannot Know Enough People, But Because Friendship Is So Vulnerable, So Likely To Diminish Or Disappear, Overcome By Space, Time, Imperfect Sympathies, And All The Sorrows Of Familial And Passional Life.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

The Idea Of Herman Melville In A Writing Class Is Always Distressing To Me.

Not A Moment Passes These Days Without Fresh Rushes Of Academic Lemmings Off The Cliffs They Proclaim The Political Responsibilities Of The Critic, But Eventually All This Moralizing Will Subside.

Shakespeare Is Universal.

To Be A Poet Did Not Occur To Me. It Was Indeed A Threshold Guarded By Demons.

Information Is Endlessly Available To Us; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

What Is Supposed To Be The Very Essence Of Judaism - Which Is The Notion That It Is By Study That You Make Yourself A Holy People - Is Nowhere Present In Hebrew Tradition Before The End Of The First Or The Beginning Of The Second Century Of The Common Era.

Unless You Have Read And Absorbed The Best That Can Be Read And Absorbed, You Will Not Think Clearly Or Well.

The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . The Mind's Dialogue With Itself Is Not Primarily A Social Reality. All That The Western Canon Can Bring One Is The Proper Use Of One's Own Solitude, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.

I Don't Believe In Myths Of Decline Or Myths Of Progress, Even As Regards The Literary Scene.

Read Deeply, Not To Believe, Not To Accept, Not To Contradict, But To Learn To Share In That One Nature That Writes And Reads.

We Read To Find Ourselves, More Fully And More Strangely Than Otherwise We Could Hope To Find.

The Art And Passion Of Reading Well And Deeply Is Waning, But [jane] Austen Still Inspires People To Become Fanatical Readers.

There Is No Method Except Yourself.

Dark Influences From The American Past Congregate Among Us Still. If We Are A Democracy, What Are We To Make Of The Palpable Elements Of Plutocracy, Oligarchy, And Mounting Theocracy That Rule Our State? How Do We Address The Self-inflicted Catastrophes That Devastated Our Natural Environment? So Large Is Our Malaise That No Single Writer Can Encompass It. We Have No Emerson Or Whitman Among Us. An Institutionalized Counterculture Condemns Individuality As Archaic And Depreciates Intellectual Values, Even In The Universities. (the Anatomy Of Influence)

Counter Culture

To Read In The Service Of Any Ideology Is Not, In My Judgment, To Read At All.

... One Doesn't Want To Read Badly Any More Than Live Badly, Since Time Will Not Relent. I Don't Know That We Owe God Or Nature A Death, But Nature Will Collect Anyway, And We Certainly Owe Mediocrity Nothing, Whatever Collectivity It Purports To Advance Or At Least Represent.

At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.

What Is Literary Tradition? What Is A Classic? What Is A Canonical View Of Tradition? How Are Canons Of Accepted Classics Formed,and How Are They Unformed? I Think That All These Quite Traditional Questions Can Take One Simplistic But Still Dialectical Question As Their Summing Up: Do We Choose Tradition Or Does It Choose Us, And Why Is It Necessary That A Choosing Take Place, Or A Being Chosen? What Happens If One Tries To Write, Or To Teach, Or To Think, Or Even To Read Without The Sense Of A Tradition? Why, Nothing At All Happens, Just Nothing.

Literature Is Achieved Anxiety.

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One Measures Oncoming Old Age By Its Deepening Of Proust, And Its Deepening By Proust. How To Read A Novel? Lovingly, If It Shows Itself Capable Of Accomodating One's Love; And Jealously, Because It Can Become The Image Of One's Limitations In Time And Space, And Yet Can Give The Proustian Blessing Of More Life.

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The Very Best Of All Merwin: I Have Been Reading William Since 1952, And Always With Joy.

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Falling In Love

All That A Critic, As Critic, Can Give Poets Is The Deadly Encouragement That Never Ceases To Remind Them Of How Heavy Their Inheritance Is.

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The World Gets Older, Without Getting Either Better Or Worse And So Does Literature. But I Do Think That The Drab Current Phenomenon That Passes For Literary Studies In The University Will Finally Provide Its Own Corrective.

The Most Beautiful Prose Paragraph Yet Written By Any American.

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I Think The Greek New Testament Is The Strongest And Most Successful Misreading Of A Great Prior Text In The Entire History Of Influence.

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The World Does Not Get To Be A Better Or A Worse Place; It Just Gets More Senescent.

Everyone Wants A Prodigy To Fail; It Makes Our Mediocrity More Bearable.

The Second, And I Think This Is The Much More Overt And I Think It Is The Main Cause, I Have Been Increasingly Demonstrating Or Trying To Demonstrate That Every Possible Stance A Critic, A Scholar, A Teacher Can Take Towards A Poem Is Itself Inevitably And Necessarily Poetic.

Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.

What Matters In Literature In The End Is Surely The Idiosyncratic, The Individual, The Flavor Or The Color Of A Particular Human Suffering.

Everything In Life Is Arbitrary Yet Must Be Over-determined In Literature. Jean Mcgarry Knows How To Tell A Persuasive Tale Illuminating These Truths.

But In The End, In The End One Is Alone. We Are All Of Us Alone. I Mean I'm Told These Days We Have To Consider Ourselves As Being In Society... But In The End One Knows One Is Alone, That One Lives At The Heart Of A Solitude.

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