I have most of the books by Harold Bloom. He is not that easy to read. He is extremely learned and constantly uses words not in my vocabulary and writers and philosophers in my memory. My two favourite books of his are ? How to Read and Why? and Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human. The latter book was the bible that Rosemary and I would read before going to a Shakespeare play at Christopher Gaze’s Bard on Beach. I was pleased, that like me, Gaze had Bloom’s book on his night table. And of course both of us know that Bloom’s favourite character in Shakespeare is Sir John Falstaff.
My current Bloom read is his Where Shall Wisdom be Found? I chose to start at the end with Saint Augustine and Reading which contains a most elaborate and detailed review of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. I have read that novel, a contemporary of Shakespeare, twice and I know that after this Bloom chapter I will have to read it again.
My grandmother often talked to me about San Agustín and in my Catholic boarding school of St. Edward’s in Austin I learned that while Agustín and Thomas Aquinas are both saints they are considered to be great philosophers.
It was in CBC Radio’s Ideas in a program dedicated to St. Augustine – Bishop of Hippo that I found out a little glimpse of the man’s philosophy. He stated that when you listened to music (atonal music was far in the horizon) you hear that first note, in the past, the second one in the present and (most important) the next note in the future.
Here is the fine excerpt from Bloom’s chapter on St. Augustine:
It is from Augustine that we learn to read, since he first established the relationship between reading and memory, though for him the purpose of reading was our conversion to Christ. Nevertheless, I read poetry aloud and seek to possess it by memory because of Augustine, and like Hamlet I set the will above the Word, in conscious defiance of Augustine. Shakespeare, in my judgement, invented the inner self, but only because Augustine had made it possible, by creating autobiographical memory (read Julian Barnes’s Departure(s) who writes exactly of that topic), in which one’s own life becomes the text. We think because we learn to remember our reading the best that can be read – for Augustine the Bible and Virgil, Cicero and the Neoplatonists,to which we have added for ourselves Plato, Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare, with Joyce and Proust in the century just past. But always remain in the progeny of Augustine, who first told us that the book alone could nourish thought, memory, and the intricate interplay of in the life of the mind. Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing down in which America now leads the world,as in all other matters.
