How to Read and Why By Harold Bloom

 

How to Read and Why

By Harold Bloom (2000)

“There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, atleast in my opintion, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness....imaginative literature is otherness and as such, aleviates loneliness.” P.19

“It matters, if individuals are to retain any ablility to form their own judgement's and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly on themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interests.” P.21

“Ultimately we read---as Bacon, Johnson and Emerson agree---in order to strenthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” P.22

“The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply. I remain sceptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.” P.22

“Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neigborhood by what or how you read. Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit: there are no eithic of reading.” P.24

“You need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, the the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others” P.24

“We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” P.25

“We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.” P.28

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: 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 strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading the now much abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.” P.29

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” P.29