I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at least one of these, you passionate Readers!
Mark
You do not read Don Quixote or In Search of Lost Time for the plot, but for the progressive development of the characters and for the gradual unfolding, indeed the revelation, of the author’s vision. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, Swann and Albertine, become presences as intimate and yet ultimately as enigmatic as your dearest friends.
One potentially valuable lesson in how to read a great novel is to ask the question: Do the principal characters change and, if they do, what causes them to change? In Marcel Proust’s magnificent In Search of Lost Time, the Shakespearean pattern of change through self-overhearing dominates, whereas in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the likable hero, Hans Castorp, follows the Cervantine design, with the liberal philosopher Settembrini playing the role of an intellectualized Sancho to Castorp’s Quixote.
Hamlet, in his seven soliloquies, teaches us what imaginative literature can teach us, which is how to talk to oneself, and not how to talk to others.
Silent intensive rereadings of a shorter poem that truly finds you should be followed by recitations to yourself, until you discover that you are in possession of the poem.
Committed to memory, the poem will possess you, and you will be able to read it more closely, which great poetry demands and rewards.
The poet Shelley, who was in some respects Wordsworth’s involuntary disciple, once defined the poetic Sublime as an experience that persuaded readers to give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures.
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?
The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply.
The ultimate answer to the question “Why read?” is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self. Until you become your self, what benefit can you be to others?
Whitman was self-published, as Blake was, while Dickinson and Hopkins were brought out posthumously.
All of Proust’s characters are essentially comic geniuses; as such they give us the option of believing that the truth is as funny as it is grim.
Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain, you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
