… and has had to cancel this semester’s classes. 79 years old, Bloom has attempted to teach for the last few semesters, but illness and injury had him canceling most of them as well.
A stubborn old coot who has written angrily about the betrayal of literary values by people who think beauty reactionary, Bloom would have been a great blogger. And no, he doesn’t revile the internet.
If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.
I’ve been reading a lot of Camus today (the fiftieth anniversary of his death happened a few days ago), and what Camus says about discovering literature is very Bloomian. Here’s Camus, reading Jean Grenier’s Les Iles as a very young man:
A garden of incomparable wealth was opening up to me; I had just discovered art. Something, someone was stirring dimly within me, longing to speak. Reading one book, hearing one conversation, can provoke this rebirth in a young person. One sentence stands out from the open book, one word still vibrates in the room, and suddenly, around the right word, the exact note, contradictions resolve themselves and disorder ceases. Already, at the same moment, in response to this perfect language, a timid, clumsier song rises from the darkness of our being.
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Bloom said this in an interview about ten years ago:
I have told the president of Yale, Rick Levin, who is a very splendid man, that I intend to be carried out of my very last Yale class in a large body bag, still talking, many years down the road. I–I will not retire. I don’t think they will wish me to retire. I don’t think they can or will make me retire. Obviously, if my health goes completely at some point and I cannot get myself into the classroom, if my mind goes and I can no longer think and articulate clearly, if I’m not capable of teaching well, then I will stop teaching. But otherwise–otherwise, I would hope to teach until I die. It’s–it’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for 46 years. And I think I would go mad and feel worse than useless without it.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:47PM
What ever Bloom’s body decides to do, I will not stop learning from him. One of my favorite writers of the last half century.