When I was a college freshman—back when I liked to read
obscure books to satisfy my pretension—I stumbled upon a genre I had never
heard of before, in a book and author who were equally unfamiliar: Novelists and Novels, a collection of
essays in literary criticism by Harold Bloom.
Cool! I thought, this guy has read all the cool books that I have, and even some that
I haven’t! Too cheap to buy the book, I spent hours at the BYU bookstore,
flipping through Bloom’s essays, anxious to hear what he thought about Jane Eyre, Sons and Lovers, The Sound
and the Fury, Ulysses. I
subscribed completely to Bloom’s philosophy: reading well means seeking for
aesthetic and spiritual wisdom, not collecting ammunition for political polemics.
Bloom
completely altered the path of my education. He taught me to read books as I
would read scripture, that literature is different than allegory, that solitude
requires responsibility. He gave me the courage to change majors, and to take
literature as seriously as I do living. This is spirituality—the art of living
full, and of embracing humanity with confidence. Six years later, I am amazed
that his writing had this effect on me, particularly because there is so much other literary criticism out there that
I find soul-suckingly anti-human.
I haven’t
given you any examples yet, so I will just end this essay with one of his
quotes:
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in your friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read…because we cannot know enough people.
(How to Read and Why, 19).
