How To Read and Why
Metadata
- Author: Harold Bloom
Highlights
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 friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. — location: 44
find what comes near to you that can be put to the use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time’s tyranny. Pragmatically that means, first find Shakespeare, and let him find you. — location: 82
Read therefore by the inner light that John Milton celebrated and that Emerson rook as a principle of reading, which can be our third: A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. — location: 122
Self-trust is nor an endowment, but is the Second Birth of the mind, which cannot come without years of deep reading. There are no absolute standards for the aesthetic. — location: 136
Borges attributed this universalism to Shakespeare’s apparent selflessness, bur that quality is a large metaphor for Shakespeare’s difference, which finally is cognitive power as such. We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own. — location: 140
that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. — location: 195