How to Read and Why
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. You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you'll read against the clock. Bible readers, those who search the Bible for themselves, perhaps exemplify the urgency more plainly than readers of Shakespeare, yet the quest is the same. One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change alas is universal. Read not ro contradict and confute, nor ro believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. - Sir Francis Bacon 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 skeptical 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. Interview: Unless you read deeply and in your own interest, Unless you explore what is the most profound in what has come before you then you will never get down to the recesses of your own self.
You never learned what Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly called self trust and self-reliance and most deeply you never will heal the self.
I think that in a culture which has all of the peculiar difficulties and complexities of the one currently developing around us, there is nothing more profoundly healing in the act of solitary reading provided that what is being read indeed permanent, deep, lasting work.
Work that calls for all of your faculties in response work that calls you out of your own deep as it were work that transform you that is to say Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Jane Austen. We knew who these authors are, we neglect them I think at our own potential debasement. --- Even some of the best, simply have not read enough. Reading is in the end even though one doesn't want to discourage reading groups which do good works. But reading is in the end of solitary activity. You're not really learning I believe how to speak to other people when you are deeply engaged in reading Shakespeare/ Dante/ Cervantes. You're fundamentally learning how to speak to yourself, you're learning how to listen to yourself, you're learning the discipline of yourself. You are indeed in the act of discovering yourself. Some kind of preparation needs to be made before you have a young individual with the incredible, the endless range of the Internet coming at them all at once. I mean they can't just as it were surf endlessly, None of us live forever. There's only so much time in the end to read. Our time is limited we read against the clock, we read ultimately in the shadow of mortality and I think it does matter immensely what you read and how you read it. I have moved by idealism and have some residual idealism in myself but I think there are enermous obstacle now I think that the tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing. The next idea is to defend the idea of individual genius itself and of potential genius. I think it's absurdly pushed aside. The public to some degree does the universities have long since abandoned it and explained it away on the basis of one historical factor or another. Ie. Saying that Shakespeare is the product of certain historical forces as it were this is not a very good explanation. Because then one wants to know why Thomas Middleton or some other contemporary of Shakespeare John Fletcher or Fisher the same kind of force was not equally historically benefited. To possess something by memory to really read a poem hundreds of time because it can sustain hundreds of readings to read a poem like the great anonymous poem the greatest anonymous poem in the language atomic bedlam song or which I mean to hold in your heart and your memory. ---
POEM:
A Shropshire Lad, XL A. E. Housman 1859 – 1936
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses, published in 1842, has been called the first true dramatic monologue. After Ulysses, Tennyson's most famous efforts in this vein are Tithonus, The Lotos-Eaters, and St. Simon Stylites, all from the 1842 Poems; later monologues appear in other volumes, notably Idylls of the King.
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Harold Bloom, "How to read and why" Youtube Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVWiwd0P0c0
