Harold Bloom: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
Bloom, Harold. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead, 2004)
The distinction between knowledge and wisdom is an ageless one, as the attainment of the former is often seen as a mere prologue for the latter. The lofty goal of becoming wise is one that prolific critic Harold Bloom here pursues through the medium of literature, as he considers the wisdom writings of paired Biblical authors (of Job and Ecclesiastes) along with Homer and Plato, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, and concludes with The Gospel of Thomas and Augustine.
Bloom wrote this volume "out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends." (p. 1) Bloom's erudition is as impressive as ever, although it occasionally makes for slow going; some of his passages reference so many authors and ideas that most readers must either alternate reading with research or move on without fully appreciating Bloom's arguments. In all honesty, I did a bit of both--and added a number of TBR books with which to supplement his observations.
The title of Bloom's treatise comes from Job 28:12, a book which later ventures an answer to its own question:
"Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."(Job 28:28)
Bloom disagrees with this, writing:
Can you love fear? It does not work in human erotic partnership, and it turns democracy into plutocracy, where our nation seems to be heading. (p. 21)
Bloom chooses numerous excerpts to illustrate his points, but some of the longer quotations--particularly the page-long Proustian paragraphs--strike me as rather excessive in a book of less than 300 pages. Writing for the New York Times, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco calls Bloom "[a]rguably the most influential critic of the last quarter-century," and opines that he "has always written in a peculiarly mixed mode:"
...at times he seems possessed, carried out of himself into a trance brought on by meditation on a work of literary art, but at other times he seems a self-conscious performer brandishing literary props in a performance that is all about him.
The gulf between Bloom and most of the rest of us is evident in the passage where he writes of "settling down for the evening to reread Richard Lattimore's Iliad and Allan [Bloom]'s Republic side by side. Sometimes, I would interpolate scenes from King Lear, further to intensify the agon." (p. 40) For the common reader, reading a Homeric epic along with Platonic philosophy and Shakespearean drama is the work of a fortnight rather than an evening, something that I wonder if Bloom ever notices.
As a voracious reader, Bloom observes that "solitude...to me seems crucial now if reading is to survive at all," (p. 157) while worrying that "the 'common reader'...is beginning to vanish" as higher education "barely teaches most students to read better books, or to read them more closely." (p. 175) Where does this leave those of us who are short on the solitude needed to engage the wisest of books?
Bloom suggests that "[w]e read and reflect because we hunger and thirst after wisdom," (p. 284) but even his guide to textual sustenance will only help those who have time enough for more than a quick bite between other obligations. Perhaps we must treat the acquisition of wisdom as an obligation to ourselves--and a more important one than many of those that now occupy our attention--if our reading lives are to be well spent.