Thursday, December 27, 2007

Harold Bloom, Fallen Angels

Harold Bloom is an author that I read every chance I get, and this tiny little work was a bit like an appetizer. He is a literary "critic" in the sense of the term of being able to summarize, connect, and explain the great works of literature from history. 

"As Kafka prophesied, our one authentic sin is impatience: that is we are forgetting how to read. Impatience increasingly is a visual obsession; we want to see a thing instantly and then forget it. Deep reading is not like that; reading requires patience and remembering. A visual culture cannot distinguish between fallen and unfallen angels, since we cannot see either and are forgetting how to read ourselves, which means that we can see images of others, but cannot really see others or ourselves."

I would not limit mankind to only a single sin, but one can say that "impatience" may well be at the core of the original sin and much of the sin of modern religion. Adam and Eve wanted "Godhood" NOW-instantly, no development, no maturity, no "good time". Many Christians want salvation as an "event vs a process"-full assurance TODAY with no need to live a walk for a lifetime with constant interaction with Grace AND human frailty and sin.  

"Our most creative impulses thrust us further into a confrontation with the mirror of nature, where we behold our own image, fall in love with it, and soon enough fall into the consciousness of death. Though I call such angelicism "fallen", it is the inevitable condition of whenever we see to create anything of our own, whether it be a book, a marriage, a family, a life's work."

This short sampling of a book whets my appetite yet again to try to find the time to dive into the world of Shakespeare and other great literature to at least get a glimpse of the vast storehouse of human history that has been locked away by the largely left-leaning academic Western academia, lest their carefully developed savages glimpse the storehouse of culture and human truth and fail to dine at the trough of modern lefty "culture".

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