Perfect.

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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

W. Somerset Maugham, from The Painted Veil

Moggs Motel, "Apple Pie"

I see a million stars while lying on my bed

Oh, it’s etched in anaglypta and it swirls around around my head

I see Marco Polo on the Silk Road trail

And the cursed Captain Ahab now he's fishing for a whale ...

Garden.

Holbein, the Younger, Portrait of Sir Thomas More, 1527

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Sir Thomas More

Real.

Two "invisible workers" remember being in the presence of Bloom ...

As teachers who take pride in lesson planning and deliberate pedagogy, observing those seminar sessions could be frustrating. He tired easily and often had trouble with the Ozzian telecommunication medium. The intelligent and engaged students sometimes struggled to respond to the prompts he posed but did not have the energy to fully elucidate. He recapitulated material from his books or spent much of class asking students to read the plays aloud at length. Perhaps because he notoriously treated characters as if they were real people, he posed questions that seemed puzzling or downright unanswerable.

Be gone, boys.  Remain invisible.

True.

I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho's grand admonition: "Whatever it is, I'm against it!”

Harold Bloom

Distinguish.

The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise.  If multiculturalism meant Cervantes, who could quarrel with it? The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato.  Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates.  What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semi-ruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice? Our current New Historicists, with their odd blend of Foucault and Marx, are only a very minor episode in the endless history of Platonism. Plato hoped that by banishing the poet, he would also banish the tyrant. Banishing Shakespeare, or rather reducing him to his contexts, will not rid us of our tyrants. In any case, we cannot rid ourselves of Shakespeare, or of the Canon that he centers. Shakespeare, as we like to forget, largely invented us; if you add the rest of the Canon, then Shakespeare and the Canon wholly invented us. Emerson, in Representative Men, got this exactly right: "Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors.  For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique."

Harold Bloom, from "Elegy for the Canon"

Forever.

In a recent post, Kurt points to an article on a form of mass-murder being committed in classrooms today.

In the movie, Amadeus, there is a spirited dialog that Mozart has with Baron Von Swieten over themes and appropriate content for the masses ...

VON SWIETEN

Mozart, music is not the issue here.  No one doubts your talent. It is  your judgment of literature that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, this thing would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on such rubbish?  Surely you can choose more elevated themes?

MOZART

Elevated?  What does that mean?  Elevated! The only thing a man should elevate is - oh, excuse me. I'm sorry.  I'm stupid. But I am fed up to the teeth with elevated things! Old dead  legends! How can we go on forever writing about gods and legends?

VON SWIETEN (aroused)

Because they do. They go on forever - at least what they represent. The eternal in us, not the ephemeral. Opera is here to ennoble us. You and me, just as much as His Majesty.

It's always been happening, the battle continues today, and the good guys are losing, horribly.

Being a sixth-grade teacher, I'm privileged to have a front row seat for some of the most vulgar, rightfully childish, but genuinely funny behavior I've ever witnessed -- I consider it a perk of my position.  To return the favor, I'm an evangelist for Mozart, Caravaggio, and Stevenson.  Missionary work takes perseverance and patience, key to conversion being experience, which leads to dialog, which leads to exploration, which leads to choice, which leads to understanding and growth.

This is where the battle is being lost.  Kids are missing experiences with greatness.  I took my sixth-grade class to a school-sponsored book fair recently and was saddened (though not shocked) to see that there wasn't a single volume of classic literature among the offerings.  My classroom is thought to be a rarity, an exception, a "nerd clubhouse," even an oddity, sometimes called inappropriate for the age I teach because of the types of literature, music, and art that we explore, discuss, and think about.  Students today know nothing about Jim Hawkins, Medusa, and the Jupiter Symphony because not only have their parents missed those boats, but their teachers have as well (see a recent post on the value of real music).  

In an effort to devote more time to reading and math, our district has decided to cut the time devoted to science and social studies taught in a year in half -- one semester of science, one semester of social studies.  And still, I defy you to find a copy of Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, or The Wind in the Willows on a classroom bookshelf, let alone in the library, er -- excuse me -- Media Center.

Sir Philip Pullman says that the best way to teach kids the value of good literature isn't to drill them with lessons on plot sequence, character types, and conflict, but to leave good literature lying around to be explored, without surveillance, without judgement, without commitment, in hopes that kids will find a lifeline and grab hold.  This might be the only hope. 

Kids need to be told stories, not by appeasers, but by crusaders who care about their hearts and souls, by those willing to use courage and take the time to read to kids, sing to kids, dance to Mozart with kids; showing the not only The Way, but the purpose and the benefit of The Way.

A scene from Dead Poets Society ...

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty,  romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman:

"O me, o life of the questions of these recurring, 

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish …

What good amid these, o me, o life? 

Answer: 

That you are here. That life exists, and identity.

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse ...

Happy Birthday, Pater

The charm ... of what is classical, in art or literature, is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us. “Romanticism,” says Stendhal, “is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.” But then, beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion—of music—which what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tranquilize us. The “classic” comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty, which they possess indeed in a pre-eminent degree, and which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper. Curiosity, and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as in all true criticism. When one’s curiosity is deficient, when one is not eager enough for new impressions and new pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical properties too highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture which passed so long for true Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere irritation. 

Walter Pater, from "The Classic and Romantic in Literature", born on this day in 1839

Standards.

Without standards—aesthetic, cognitive, and imaginative—we will all perish, indeed are perishing already.

Harold Bloom

Myself.

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.  In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C.S. Lewis, from The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

Silence.

From Washington Irving's essay, "The Mutability of Literature" ...

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed. In such a mood I was loitering about the old gray cloisters of Westminster Abbey, enjoying that luxury of wandering thought which one is apt to dignify with the name of reflection, when suddenly an irruption of madcap boys from Westminster school, playing at football, broke in upon the monastic stillness of the place, making the vaulted passages and mouldering tombs echo with their merriment. I sought to take refuge from their noise by penetrating still deeper into the solitudes of the pile, and applied to one of the vergers for admission to the library. He conducted me through a portal rich with the crumbling sculpture of former ages, which opened upon a gloomy passage leading to the chapter-house and the chamber in which Doomsday Book is deposited. Just within the passage is a small door on the left. To this the verger applied a key; it was double locked, and opened with some difficulty, as if seldom used. We now ascended a dark narrow staircase, and, passing through a second door, entered the library.

I found myself in a lofty antique hall, the roof supported by massive joists of old English oak. It was soberly lighted by a row of Gothic windows at a considerable height from the floor, and which apparently opened upon the roofs of the cloisters. An ancient picture of some reverend dignitary of the Church in his robes hung over the fireplace. Around the hall and in a small gallery were the books, arranged in carved oaken cases. They consisted principally of old polemical writers, and were much more worn by time than use. In the centre of the library was a solitary table with two or three books on it, an inkstand without ink, and a few pens parched by long disuse. The place seemed fitted for quiet study and profound meditation. It was buried deep among the massive walls of the abbey and shut up from the tumult of the world. I could only hear now and then the shouts of the school-boys faintly swelling from the cloisters, and the sound of a bell tolling for prayers echoing soberly along the roofs of the abbey. By degrees the shouts of merriment grew fainter and fainter, and at length died away; the bell ceased to toll, and a profound silence reigned through the dusky hall.

CONNECT

Struggling.

Memorizing by rote, of course, is no good for anyone. But memorizing that comes out of deep reading and reading out loud to yourself so that you are really struggling with something that finds you and won't leave you does a great deal for people.  The more profoundly people love and understand literature, the less likely they are to be supercilious, to feel that somehow they know more than the poems, stories, novels, and epics actually know.

Harold Bloom

Teacher.

These days, whenever I read, teach, or write, I am haunted by friends who educated me: Richard Rorty, Angus Fletcher, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, John Hollander. I was very close to the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, William Merwin, and in quite a different way to James Merrill. They seem to be in the room with me. They also appear in my dreams. I have never written a poem. My only gift, as I understand it, is to have learned to listen: to students and to ghosts ...

If I have a potent precursor, it would have to be Dr. Samuel Johnson. I am a good schoolteacher: he is beyond me and beyond disruption. Had I followed family tradition, I would have become a rabbi. Instead, I am a secular rabbi like those celebrated by Wallace Stevens. I teach Shakespeare as scripture. When I teach Poetic Influence, in some ways I vanish, and in some modes I am exalted ...

I receive endless emails, straight mails, phone calls, and visits from good readers throughout the world who have been kind enough to want to tell me that I have been their teacher. There is a saving remnant. Young women and men the world over read and hear the call of wisdom and the urgency of intelligence. I am pretty much a relic, yet I believe the future — if there is one — will depend upon deep readers all over the globe. Without reading Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, and their few peers, we cannot learn how to think. And if we cannot think, then the future belongs to the Trumps of the world — that is to say, to the apocalyptic beasts from the sea.

Harold Bloom, interviewed by the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2019

CONNECT

Alluvium.

Atget, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1923

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone.

Victor Hugo

Saving.

The Public Voice Salon with Harold Bloom in a discussion called "Saving Literature" ...

Back.

I have always wanted to roll back some of the more ludicrous frontiers of the sixties in terms of education, architecture, art, music, and literature, not to mention agriculture!

Prince Charles

I've long held that I was the only good thing to come out of the sixties.

Thank you, Durham WASP.

Teaches.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

Lasts.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

Susan Sontag

Life.

Any distinction made between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

Harold Bloom

Happy birthday, Lewis.

C.S. Lewis was born on this day in 1898.

In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life. Smewgy taught us Latin and Greek, but everything else came in incidentally. The books I liked best under his teaching were Horace’s Odes, Aeneid IV, and Euripides’ Bacchae. I had always in one sense "liked" my classical work, but hitherto this had been the pleasure that everyone feels in mastering a craft. Now I tasted the classics as poetry.

C.S. Lewis

Surprised by Joy ...