The Acela Rides on a Little Sand and Rail Bar Inches Above the Calm Water…

… lying on both sides of us. We’re somewhere south of Boston, and the Quiet Car is a laptop monastery of strict observance. You don’t dare cough.

The calm water, the pale sky, the thin clouds, the soft train rocking — it’s one hell of a tranquillizing setting. The thing, the custom, the routine, the practice, is to nod off at your screen, to gaze at your computer until your eyes deaden and you zone out.

When you reenter the cloister, the open water’s gone. It’s swamp now, with scruffy trees fronting industrial sheds.

I feel intimate enough with the guy across the table from me – a big guy, young, with an OLD GUYS RULE baseball cap and a CAPE COD BASEBALL SUMMERTIME TRADITION t-shirt – to have, post-nap, elaborately adjusted my bra in front of him. We’ve shared this corner of the library for hours. He has plugged my computer in for me. He has told me to expect that when the train slows down our wi-fi connection will get messed up.

Speaking of connections — some strange and unsettling ones for UD among the people at this Harvard event. Straussianism, the University of Chicago, and Allan Bloom are not exactly unknowns for ol’ UD.

In 1979, or 1980, my friend Kevin, a fellow literature grad student at the University of Chicago (now a big shot lawyer) said I had to take a course with Allan Bloom. “You’ll love him. I promise. You will absolutely love him.”

Bloom’s course on Rousseau fit my schedule, but I knew nothing about him, and, unlike another course that I’d taken outside the English department – the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s course on metaphor – Rousseau wasn’t that interesting to me. I decided to sit in on a class and check it out.

I sat midway up in a white lecture theater on a bright afternoon and waited in a roomful of men for Bloom to appear. He did, right on time, preceded by a cloud of smoke and the sound of hacking.

There was such chaotic energy to him that right away the students in the room seemed statues and Bloom the only living thing.

Once I got a good look at him, I realized Bloom was the man I’d seen one cold afternoon last semester at The Point, a lakefront park near the university. This man was big – very broad, very tall – and wore an absolutely amazing coat of gleaming brown fur all over his body, down to the ground. He looked haunted. A haunted seal.

I thought of the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” of its main character John Marcher on his way to visit his friend May Bartram’s grave. Maybe Marcher’s name came to me because this man, with his massive, somehow military coat, and his heavy gait, seemed a sort of soldier on a march.

I’d also seen Bloom, I realized, one beautiful afternoon on campus when I was sitting on a little hill in front of the Divinity Building and Saul Bellow walked by. I sat up to get a good look at the person who wrote Herzog, a book that from the first time I read it (I must have been fourteen) had a terrifically strong impact on me. This man, the brown seal, John Marcher, was Bellow’s walking companion.

So, no more glimpses; this was the real thing, front and center, all lit up by the sun and the bright white lecture hall.

I sensed the high-strung attentiveness in the men around me, but eh. For me, it wasn’t working. For me, Bloom was all neurotic foreground, and I couldn’t work my way to the background. Maybe if the subject matter had already drawn me to it… But I wasn’t a political philosopher. Ricoeur’s course on metaphor worked perfectly for me (though I didn’t do very well in it) because much of it was ultimately getting at what made literary language weird and powerful. But Rousseau, especially in the hands of this strange man, wasn’t doing it for me.

The Author of Reading Lolita…

… in Tehrancommenting on events in Iran:

“Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but [against] what he stood for.

… But the most amazing thing is just that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest.

And for me personally, the most important thing was that [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had taken up reformist slogans which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning and I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.”

[Interviewer]: You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?

“If you look at it in the long term – yes it is. [I’ll] never forget when Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.

At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.

… I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. [The interview’s translator makes a mistake here. It’s canaries in the mine. But UD‘s enchanted by canaries of the mind.] If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”

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