It's a beautiful rather balmy afternoon here at the Yale Bowl and as I am watching the Bulldogs quarterback Kurt Rawlings completing a career high 390 passing yards and his team running past the somnolent Lions---and I am thinking what is Harold Bloom that towering admirer, creator, critic and sometime curmudgeon worshiper at the canonical temple of western humanities doing right now?
You see, I have never met Dr. Bloom, appointed Yale Sterling Professor of the Humanities in 1983, have never read any of his 40 books of literary criticism.
So, why was he on my mind?
Some 3 weeks earlier while perusing the weekend October 12-13, Review Section of the Wall Street Journal, I chanced on an article entitled A Cat that Walks by Himself which informed me that "As a student of Western literature, (emphasis mine), Mr Bloom is drawn to what Longinus called the sublime--to works of power, strangeness and intensity that leave one spiritually shaken and stirred. Such works, as the critic once said (nodding to Wordsworth), are 'capable of giving you a sense of something ever more about to be.' "
I know he,too, was born in the Bronx. And at an early age he began reading and memorizing books at the Melrose branch of New York City library about 2.5 miles from my birthplace in the East Tremont section.
I knew this man adored Shakespeare as a divinity (indeed, his spirit dwelt on mountaintops) and had a voracious appetite for only those western writers deserving to reside in his self created pantheon .
What I did not know at the Yale Bowl is that Prof. Bloom had passed away about 3 weeks earlier.
When skimming articles in the Arts and Letters section of the Jewish Week of October 25, my eyes caught a JTA article entitled Harold Bloom Dreamed in Yiddish Until his Death.
Indeed, Yiddish was his mother tongue and the very first Shakespeare play Bloom heard was in Yiddish where the magnificent Maurice Schwartz played Shylock.
Alas, at the Yale Bowl that balmy day with the Yale Bull Dog showing its might and supremacy, Professor Bloom may have well bellowed these memorable lines from The Merchant of Venice : "Thou callest me a dog before thou hast cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs."
(Perhaps, the often curmudgeonly Bloom might have had more than his beloved team in mind.....)
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