Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Rating:
Summary: Lit. as Wisdom
Review:
Bloom has proven himself a master of the intellectual life. His passion for learning and knowledge is contagious and it's that steady enthusiasm which makes this book pleasurable.

Bloom starts out working from the premise that literature can inform our lives. Certainly this is well established and few would challenge him. It's working from this assertion that he develops his ideas that even contrary forms of wisdom have shaped the thinking of Western civilization. And it's here that he sounds almost Hegelian in his push towards greater knowledge through conflict and synthesis.

One area I had hoped Bloom had developed more is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Are they synonymous? Is all knowledge wisdom? Is some more valuable to the individual than other knowledge?

Bloom describes those writers whose brand of wisdom he holds in highest esteem. And it's here that I wanted Bloom to articulate specific criteria for the types of literature he would categorize as lending to wisdom. He certainly elevates some works above others. For instance he places Shakespeare, Cervantes, and others above the fray. Additionally, he includes some books of the bible like Ecclesiastes and Job. So, he elevates this subset, but then within this subset he doesn't seem to allow for a hierarchy - placing them all on equal footing. My questions would be...

1. Why are some works elevated above others?
2. What criteria can be used to identify works of wisdom?
3. Within the subset Bloom advocates how do we know none of these should be seen as more conducive for conveying wisdom?
4. Do some works of literature accurately describe the human condition and others prescribe a resolution to that condition? If so, which is of more value?
5. What is the ultimate source of wisdom?

Even with these questions posed; Bloom has made great contributions to the analysis of classic literature and ideas - in many of his books. And here is another example, well worth reading.


Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: The author does a fine job at sounding esoteric, but at the expense of the reader. He presupposes prior knowledge of his topic leading the unwary into a wearisome and verbose dialogue of nonsense. It is difficult to to remain on track and to know the author's direction.

I am glad I checked this one out at the library first. Not one for my book shelf. My recommendation is to go to the primary sources in search of wisdom.

Rating:
Summary: An utter waste of time
Review: After reading this book, and indeed while reading it, I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. Laughter at the thought that anyone could take such a narrow-minded presentation at all seriously, or cry at the gullibility and crudity of the other reviews who obviously loved it. The Author's lack of exposure to Asian, Arabic, Indian and Native Americans (from both North and South America) cultural contributions is astounding. I find it highly amusing that a person of such apparently limited horizons would presume to write a book with such boundless premise. I suppose that anyone who reads three books could call themselves an expert on those books, and could come up with a comparative analysis of them in some presumptuous context of bestowing enlightenment on the poor huddled masses.

This book would be better entitled: "My Personal View of the Greatness of Jewish and Western Thought." There is no comparative analysis done, except with straw men. The Author exhibits time and again a lock of knowledge about the sources that he is quoting, their historical context and the interpretations that they generated in the ages in which they were written. Holding up popular fiction from Elizabethan times as somehow manifesting the morals of eternity is like combing the dialogue of "The Simpson's" for pearls of wisdom. I am sure that some people would find them, but those are usually not the sort of people with whom I would care to hold a meaningful conversation about humanity's morals.

In short, if you are at all modestly familiar with cultures beyond the basic European (and let's also exclude entirely the Nordic and Slavic components here), you will find this book amazingly frustrating, as you literally scream out "that's not right," or "what about (pick any non-European culture or religion you like)," or "how can you ignore the historical facts"...etc., etc. Reading this book was an exercise in frustration, as there were so many errors and omissions that they didn't bear counting.

Save your money. Listen to any 2-bit bigoted preacher on daytime US cable television and you will get a similarly blinkered view of the world and its moral direction.


Rating:
Summary: What a piece of crap?
Review: After readng like 30 pages I ask myself why am I reading this? I am still asking the answer?


Rating:
Summary: This book displays a complete lack of wisdom
Review: Apart from learning from personal experiences, wisdom is found in learning from the collective experiences and mistakes of mankind. This means reading history and biography. A basic science literacy is also necessary - certainly one can find important lessons from cosmology and evolution. Only after history, biography and science does literature come into the picture, and even then to confine oneself to the literature of the West, as Bloom does, is shockingly short-sighted in both senses of the term. Judging by Bloom's works, one feels that he doesn't even realize such countries as China, Japan, and Iran even exist.

Rating:
Summary: Reading as a quest for poetic wisdom
Review: Esteemed literary critic, Harold Bloom (HAMLET, GENIUS, HOW TO READ AND WHY, SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN, THE WESTERN CANON, THE BOOK OF J), is also a Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former professor at Harvard. In his latest book, WHERE SHALL WISDOM BE FOUND? (the title of which he has derived from Job), Professor Bloom leads us on an enthusiastic pilgrimage through the Western canon to the "Canterbury" of poetic wisdom that can be found in reading Job, Ecclesiastes, Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine. "Of wisdom," Bloom writes, "we cannot embody it, yet we can be taught how to know [it]" (p. 284). And Professor Bloom--truly the embodiment of great literature--certainly has the credentials to teach us how to discover wisdom in reading great literature.

"We read . . . to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become . . . The deepest motive for reading has to be the quest for wisdom," Bloom observes. "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" (pp. 101; 278).

In an era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling, Bloom confeses that he watches reading die with "elegiac sadness" (p. 277), noting that he now has three criteria for literature: "aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom." In his book, Bloom addresses the never-ending, "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy (p. 208). In his opinion, we ought not have to choose between Plato and Homer, "though Plato wants us to choose;" we can appreciate both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior (p. 63).

I admire Bloom's infectious passion for reading, and much like his other books, WHERE SHALL WE FIND WISDOM? will inspire readers to discover the poetic wisdom of the Western canon.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Complex and thought-provoking
Review: Harold Bloom is unquestionably one of this country's academic literary heavyweights. He has taught at Yale for many years. The listing of his books preceding the title page of this, his latest production, runs to 28 items. His opinions are strongly held, closely argued, often idiosyncratic, and never superficial. He seems to have read, digested and remembered not only all the works he is discussing, but also all the published critical comment on them down through the years.

The subject of this book is what Bloom calls "wisdom writing," a term that pretty well explains itself. The unspoken corollary, of course --- one that Bloom never really acknowledges --- is that each reader will have his own list of "wisdom" literature and that no two lists will exactly agree. Bloom's list begins with Plato and gets no closer to our own day than Proust and Joyce. The two major Gods in his pantheon are Shakespeare for poetry and Cervantes for the novel. Others who earn high marks from him include Sir Francis Bacon, Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. There are some surprises on his roster --- the anonymous authors of those parts of the Old Testament known as the Kabbalah or Hebrew Bible, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and Sigmund Freud, to name three. Americans who earn places on his team include Emerson and, on a slightly lesser level, Walt Whitman.

All of these authors and a number of others (Goethe, Saint Augustine) are discussed in densely packed and allusive prose. Bloom comes across as an academic writing mainly for his fellow academics. He has, however, one gift that many of his fellow academics lack --- he communicates well his own enthusiasm for the works he is discussing. You may not agree with all of Bloom's judgments and you may not understand what he is trying to tell you in his knotted prose --- but you will know that these are books and authors that matter deeply to him. If you go back to those you may not know and reacquaint yourself with them, he will have achieved his purpose.

The book often reads like a transcript of graduate-level college lectures or perhaps the gist of a learned literary seminar. But every so often Bloom sets off a colorful aphoristic skyrocket that for a moment lights up not only his subject but also his own mind: Sometimes, while reading THE ILIAD, he says, "you get the impression that the gods are a storytelling convenience" who "live on forever, perfectly cheerful as they contemplate our sufferings." Nicely put.

Bloom's admiration for Shakespeare brings him back time and again to two characters, Hamlet and Falstaff, who seem to him to most perfectly embody Shakespeare's world and wisdom. Safe choices, perhaps, but argued with uncommon gusto.

His characterization of Goethe centers on the man's "paganism." His chapter on Proust wanders off into a dense literary thicket on the subject of jealousy. There are indeed many spots in this book where even the well-educated and careful reader will have to go back over a sentence or a paragraph several times in order to puzzle out exactly what Bloom has in mind. This book is not a beach read, nor even a Saturday-afternoon-in-the-backyard-hammock item. Not surprisingly, Bloom is full of disdain for the level of American higher education, reserving for it the sarcastic nickname "mediaversity," in which the first syllable obviously stands for "mediocrity." It's safe to write that sort of thing when you are a revered professor and critic with half a century of college teaching on your resume.

Harold Bloom thinks great literature is important enough to discuss seriously. He is right, of course. You may not find him easy reading, but he will set you to thinking.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn ([e-mail])

Rating:
Summary: Where indeed . . .?
Review: To some degree Professor Harold Bloom has absorbed so much literature he has usurped it. He can read about five hundred pages per hour and when you consider the fact that he used to read one thousand pages per hour it is arguable that he has actually read more than any other human being in human history. The resources he brings to bear on his given subject matter in "Where Shall Wisdom Be Found" are enormous to the point of absurdity. But I am not convinced massive erudition alone makes for great literary criticism. The great writer G.K. Chesterton once boasted that he had read a thousand penny dreadfuls (as the trash novels of his time were called)and that he could describe the plot of any of them. The Great King Chesterton was never defeated. But it was not Chesterton's odd erudition that made him a formiddable critic and it is not Professor Bloom's erudition that has made him into something of a cultural hero to many. But the good Professor does have his flaws and in his instance perhaps they do come from his erudition.
For me (at any rate)the Professor's flaws as a writer have finally caught up with him. Since the wonderful shock of "The Western Canon" Bloom's prose has suffered from the constant repetition of a double or triple handful of ideas. We all know what they are - Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever; Shakespeare's only peers are Cervantes, Montaigne, etc.;the universities have collapsed and fallen into the hands of those scoundrels in the School of Resentment; reading is strictly a solitary activity; and so forth. The ideas have been recycled so often I have come to doubt each and every one of them merely on principal and to give myself a sense of relief.
The Professor also continues his habit of reciting lists of names - the names of authors he thinks important in various categories - and I have come to believe they function as a mantra of some sort.
I must admit it is terribly tiring to read his constant insistance that reading is absolutely necessary to spiritual growth. What about great music - rock and classical and jazz? What about painting? What about back packing and swimming and spelunking and fencing? But more importantly I sincerely wonder about the ethics of a critic who implies that the illiterate have hardly any spiritual lives. There's a sort of intellectual provinciality in such a stance.
The problem with Professor Bloom is not that he has read too many books. The problem with Professor Bloom is that he has not spent enough time scrubbing toilets, talking to car mechanics, sippping a cool one at a pub, hiking in winter time, and just about anything else to get him out of his capacious but closed head. His prose has always struck me as being almost ethereal, disembodied, as if he has seperated his own imagination from the redemptive power of pure physicality and the spiritual glory of matter.
Major flaws of the book include the fact that he hardly ever does argue his more provacative points. This is a failing that goes back to "The Western Canon" where he threw off shocking sentences like a tired academic re-incarnation of Oscar Wilde. He has always failed, most of the time to engage the reader with the kind of tightly woven arguments that make for good literary criticism.
His chapter of the Gospel of Thomas is most disturbing. He admits that he is preaching a Gnostic sermon but such a sermon is undesirable - he has preached it before in other books and what we would all like from him is an interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas that makes its partiuclar wisdom clear (if that particular work actually does have wisdom).
This book, however, is not without its charms. The Professor's melancholy is in evidence and the self-dramatization of a readerly elite against the cruel ideologues has its amusement value. His taste for inter-textual perversities remains infectious. The Professor is a profoundly aggresive (though ethereal) writer and it is a great joy to see that the lion in winter remains a lion.
Bloom has been described as a kidnapper who took hostage the whole of literature and was releasing it bit by bit on his own terms. I think that that is part of the thrill of reading him - one feels as if the Professor has become superhuman merely by reading and re-reading the whole of the Western literary canon and brooding darkly upon it until the ink is literally oozing out of the pores of his skin.
His book achieves a kind of sublimity that feels like all two or three thousand years of literary quagmires and literary vulcanic eruptions have exploded over that line that divides madness and genius. Harold Bloom is Jacob and the whole of western literature is God and Jacob and God wrestle with each other for a thousand years all night long.
C.S. Lewis once described himself as a dinosaur meaning that he was among the last of a breed that was deeply immersed in the great Greek and Latin writers of Late Antiquity and before. Harold Bloom occupies a similar place regarding the great European, American, and Latin American writers from the Middle Ages until Samuel Beckett.
What ever happens in this new century to the literary tradition Bloom is the largest embodiment of his name will endure where ever we rebel readers keep reading.

Rating:
Summary: Other choices
Review: What about Aesop's fables, "the Arabian Nights," "the Rubaiyat," and "the Epic of Gilgamesh"? Seems like we have a tiny menu to choose from if we only take Prof. Bloom's ideas. Besides, Europe is all he knows or cares to know. How are we going to change the Middle East if we totally neglect the culture and literature of the Arabs? Most American GI's don't even know a single word of Arabic, and yet Bloom wants us to keep reading Shakespeare as though "Hamlet" was sent down from heaven and this (and similar works on Bloom's list) were enough to guide us through life. King Solomon had wisdom, but he didn't read Shakespeare or any of the works Bloom places such a high premium on. Wisdom is found in using your head, not parroting professors of literature.

Rating:
Summary: Another fascinating book...
Review: Where Shall Wisdom be Found? is another fascinating book by Harold Bloom. He (somewhat arbitrarily) chooses the greatest wisdom writers of all time, and his perspective on their work is very illuminating. He goes through the history of the western world and selects two authors from each time period. The couplets are Job and Ecclesiastes (books, not people), Plato and Homer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzche, Freud and Proust, and Thomas and Saint Augustine.

Even though I highly recommend this work, I disagree with much of what Mr. Bloom has to say. What makes it worthwhile is his invaluable commentary of the figures listed above - who they were, and the thoughts they express. However, nowhere in the book does Bloom give us HIS definition of what wisdom is - and everything is judged by his own very personal standards.

Literary criticism is, by definition, subjective; and it is Mr. Bloom's own personal prejudices that may put some readers off. In his defense, at least he is honest about his prejudices. "I agree with absolutely nothing in The City of God, but then the book is not addressed to a Jew and a Gnostic." Mr. Bloom constantly reminds us that he is not a philosopher; so, in the battle between literature and philosophy, he continuously asserts that we prefer literature. He considers Plato the greatest philosopher, but casually tosses him aside with preference to Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.

In trying to decipher his criteria for wisdom, it seems to center on useful aphorisms. It seems to be the reason he prefers literature rather than carefully constructed philosophical arguments. I had a logic teacher who uses to disparage maxims as "bumper sticker philosophy," and I think he has a point.

Also, in this stage in his career, Mr. Bloom has lost sight of who the true enemy is. He continues a pointless and wrongheaded feud with Stephen King and J. K. Rowling as `enemies of literacy.' Nothing could be further off base. He writes that his criteria for reading are "aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom." These are not the only criteria - sometimes you just want a good story. And, if I may be a philistine for a moment, I do think you can find a bit of wisdom even from Harry Potter, unless you are determined not to find it.

At a reading, Mr. Bloom said he should have included Kierkegaard, who keeps popping up in this book. I think Kierkegaard would have illuminated much about wisdom. It is not so much about saying that Plato is wrong and Shakespeare is right, but about one's own commitment to a belief system. Bloom rightly points out that literature holds a mirror, not to nature, but to ourselves. We find the wisdom in books that we are looking for. Mr. Bloom's wisdom may not be yours.