Handout for introductory session is from

How To Read and Why

By Harold Bloom
Scribner: Copyright © 2000 by Harold Bloom

Prologue: Why Read?

Bible readers, those who search the Bible for themselves, perhaps exemplify the urgency [for reading] 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 is universal.

Stages of reading

1. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s prime concern… "what comes near to ourself, what we can use."
2. Sir Francis Bacon’s concern… "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."
3. Emerson’s concern… the best books "impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads."
4. Bloom fuses this as… find what comes near to you that can be put to the use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time’s tyranny.

Pragmatically that means

1. first find Shakespeare, and let him find you.
2. first find Genesis, and let it find you.

Ultimately we read -- as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree -- in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests. We experience such augmentation as pleasure, which may be why aesthetic values have always been deprecated by social moralists, from Plato through our current campus Puritans. The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply.

Principles of reading

1. Clean your cant (speech overflowing with pious platitudes)
2. Do not attempt to improve your neighbour or your neighbourhood by what or how you read
3. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light
4. One must be an inventor to read well
5. The recovery of the ironic

To read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. You are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions, and Shakespeare (Genesis) speaks to as much of you as you can bring to him (it).