Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!

I love Barnes and Noble. When I go there, however, I become more and more overwhelmed. I have a fear of not reading everything I want to read before I die (and, paradoxically, a worse fear of reading everything I want to read before I die), and wandering through aisles and aisles of unread literature reminds me of this fear.

While I, a lowly English teacher, struggle to read (and process and remember) these volumes of text, there is one man who seems to have read and critiqued them all: Harold Bloom. On my bookshelf is a 745-page tome, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in which Bloom examines each of the Bard's plays in depth, then draws conclusions about his work as a whole. Although this book could be considered a life's work, it was published a decade ago, leaving him ample time to compose thirty books, as well as lending his service as editor/author of introductions, forwards, and afterwards to dozens of books on a variety of literature...and still managing to regularly publish articles on the side. Bloom is an authority on the canon: in addition to these "smaller" works, he published The Western Canon, which is a survey of the greatest works of European literature.

I am in awe. I will be surprised if I am able to read in my lifetime all that this man has written.

And yet he seems modest about his brilliance: in Invention, he says, "...T.S. Eliot's observation [is] that all we can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way. I propose only that we cease to be wrong about him by stopping trying to be right. I have read and taught Shakespeare almost daily for these past twelve years, and am certain that I see him only darkly. His intellect is superior to mine: why should I not learn to interpret him by gauging that superiority..."

And so we mere mortals are humbled.