What was Harold Bloom working on at life’s end? This.
Sunday, October 20th, 2019
His dreams were still in Yiddish.
What was Harold Bloom writing at 89? According to his friend, the writer, translator, and publisher Lucas Zwirner, Bloom had started a new book called Immortality, Resurrection, Redemption: A Study in Speculation, exploring the afterlife in the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Islamic traditions. Zwirner discusses it in The Paris Review here.
“Being with Harold always felt historic, momentous,” he writes. “The world around him was thick with thoughts and feelings, dense. The people we encounter in writing pierce us, their inner lives give us more life. For those of us who were lucky enough to study with him, Harold let that life out. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t finish his book.”
America’s legendary lit critic never finished the book, of course. He died last Monday. In his last email to his friend on September 18, Bloom discussed the book, and took on Silicon Valley, too:
In the early autumn of 2019, the denial of death by Silicon Valley technocrats has been an organized phenomenon for about fifteen years. There are varied cults that keep burgeoning of which the most notorious is Terasem, founded on a science fiction novel I could not finish. Satellite dishes have been set up to record the mindsets of the new faithful and beam them out into the great beyond, in the pious hope that amiable aliens will receive them and descend with fresh panaceas to sooth the fear of dying.
Does the world grow better or worse, or does it just get older? There is nothing new under the sun. Cultivating deep inwardness depends upon the reading of the world’s masterpieces of literary works and religious scriptures. Not that Silicon Valley would be at all interested, but I would prescribe that all of them learn to read Shakespeare as he needs to be read. Self and soul would then return and take the place of fashionable evasions of the contingencies that have always shaped human lives.
Read the rest here. (And hat tip to Frank Wilson.)
A childhood chum.
And over at the Times of Israel, Bloom discusses how he still dreams in his first language, Yiddish. He was the child of Jewish Orthodox immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus: “As a very small child, three, four years old, I was sent to Sholem Aleichem schools… they were all over the Bronx. So, pretty good early education that was strictly in Yiddish… But to this day my English is very curious because I learned it only through the eye and not through the ear. I didn’t, in fact, hear English spoken until I was about 5 and a half. I was a preternaturally early reader and at 5 or 6, I was already reading Shakespeare and trying to read Milton and so on. But English is, of course, a very peculiar language, as Bernard Shaw complains, the orthography and the pronunciation have nothing in common. So to this day, I speak my own curious, inflected English. It doesn’t sound like anybody else’s. So as far as I’m concerned, I still dream in Yiddish.”
Read it here.
