Out of Panic, Self-Reliance by Harold Bloom

I am posting the entire Harold Bloom editorial on R.W. Emerson re: the election/financial crisis here, mostly because the Times missed italicizing the long quoted passages from Emerson. You all know about my affection for the Transcendentalists, something that I can't escape, even as I acknowledge them as pompous windbags. I have always seen them as an essential link from sacred to secular in the spectrum of our country's cultural heritage. Reading these passages I couldn't help but notice the cadences of King James... and I think this is one of the reasons for my deep affection for them. (Indeed, much of 19C literature.) It resonates with my sense of the Word, formed at a very early age.

I do not always agree with Bloom, but many of his essays remind me that we serve the same Word. It is probably the same reason I love one of his best known students: Camille Palia, though her recent (and, perhaps, correct) editorializing on the feminist aspects of Palin have been galling.

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( Pompous windbags, ahoy! )