Life is so entertaining.
Months ago, before I left for school, my friend Philip gave me a book* written by Harold Bloom. He thought that this was the same author that had frustrated me completely in a class I took a couple of years ago (with a philosophy professor moonlighting as an English professor) when actually, that was the other (*infamous*) academic (elitist) Allan Bloom. Still, I brought the book with me.
Then, a dear friend I dated years ago mentioned that a friend of his from high school was a professor at Yale. I looked him up and saw that he’s taught several courses on topics I am most interested in. I immediately emailed him and requested a seat in one of his classes for this semester. That was last semester and it’s a good thing I reached out early because his small seminar classes are extremely hard to get into. (They are filled up quickly by his previous students. I think I’m one of only a couple first-years in this class he’s teaching this semester.)
On the first day of class, he mentions Harold Bloom. I should have known this but Harold Bloom didn’t just write the book Philip gave me. He was a highly respected professor… at YALE… and happens to also have been a very close mentor to my current professor. I dug the book out of my stash of too-many-books-for-a-studio-apartment I brought with me and was looking through to see what Mr. H. Bloom had to say about Paradise Lost and Blake’s Milton (I mean, it makes sense that my current professor would teach similar texts, right?)
I not only opened it right up to the very page where H. Bloom discusses Milton, but on the next page I flipped to, Harold Bloom references his friendship with Allan Bloom(!) I can’t even imagine Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom in the same room! It gave me goosebumps! (And prompted me to write this…)
When people ask me why I would bother leaving a 20 year career and returning to school or “Why Yale?” I lack the words to articulate why. Then I think about synchronicities like this that are occurring so often they threaten to become the norm. Despite what these “kids” (used with affection) have been raised to believe and how they are quick to discredit what a “bunch of old, white men” had to say, they have access to education unlike any other. I’m saddened by the fact that they don’t understand the value of what they have the opportunity to learn both because they’re young and because they believe that people of a certain history have little to teach them. I am not an advocate of teaching glazed and gilded histories, but I also cannot subscribe to throwing it all away either. I greatly disagree with Allan Bloom in so very many respects however, I can absolutely acknowledge that he has a great deal to teach me no matter how offensive and controversial he was.
Learning does not mean accepting.
Going through this with more than half of my livable years gone is surreal. I truly believe everyone should get an opportunity to experience this, whether or not they did it when they were younger. No, it’s not for everyone, but it should be. Reading through humanities, philosophy, religious studies, psychology, sociology, etc… there is so very much that would have been useful had I been able to appreciate and *understand* it when I was younger. I see it in the discussions in sections. These kids are so. incredibly. smart. They think they are so prepared for the world armed with their intelligence. But there are many things that can’t be gained through knowledge alone. I bite my tongue a lot, because what is the point? Who am I to challenge their ideas about life? The real world will do that for them soon enough…
*Also, the book title by Harold Bloom is Where Shall Wisdom Be Found. 
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