Transforms.

Harold Bloom on reading, memory, and thinking ...

Unless you read deeply, and in our own interest, unless you explore what is most profound in what has come before you, then you will never get down to the recesses of your own self. You'll never learn what Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly called self-trust and self-reliance. Most deeply, you will never heal the self. In a culture which has all the peculiar difficulties, there is nothing more profoundly healing than the act of solitary reading, providing what is being read is indeed permanent, deep, lasting work. Work that calls for all of your faculties in response. Work that calls you out of your own depth. Work that transforms you.

Harold Bloom

Bloom reads and comments on How to Read and Why ... HERE.