I hope that you all enjoyed a happy Christmas day.  I was grateful to receive a fair number of books as gifts, some of which I expect I will blog about over the weeks ahead.  In that vein here is a blunt but important passage that I came across in the critic Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) last week:

“There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. (p.19)