Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death

Late critic and Yale professor Bloom (Possessed by Memory) leaves behind a passionate reflection on a lifetime of reading. Conscious of his own limited time left, he reflects that “if life is to be more than breathing, it needs the enhancement of knowledge or the kind of love that is a form of knowledge,” as he describes gaining from his favorite authors. These include Walt Whitman, from whom “I never stop learning,” whether about poetry or about the capacity to simply enjoy nature. Another is Samuel Johnson, Bloom’s model reader—the lexicographer “devoured books as he did his meat” from his early days in London, “when he walked the streets [not] knowing where the next meal or bed or book was to be found.” Bloom also shares fascinating glimpses of his academic career, from his testy run-in with British critic F.R. Leavis as a PhD student (Leavis’s statement, “I have buried [Percy Bysshe] Shelley,” elicited the “rather brash” reply “Shelley always buries his own undertakers”), to “the theoretical and pragmatic disputes I had been having with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida at Yale” at a later point. Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading 20th-century literary minds. (Oct.)