Althouse: "He read 'Moby-Dick' at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory."

June 7, 2026

"He read 'Moby-Dick' at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory."

"As an after-dinner party game, he liked to recite 'Paradise Lost,' starting from any line a tipsy guest chose."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Inside the Mind of the ‘Man Who Read Everything’/A collection of Harold Bloom’s letters details the working life of one of America’s most influential intellects" (NYT).

22 comments:

john mosby said...: Pro tip: don't put 'Dick' and 'devour' too close to each other if you are trying to praise someone. CC, JSM; 6/7/26, 6:53 PM
Josephbleau said...: I did not read the NYT article because it demands email, but Bloom’s “Western Canon” and the “Anxiety of Influence” introduced me, who Clep tested out of humanities due to great hs English I-IV classes, to what literature is. I even read a complete Shakespeare. Hurra for Bloom and his love for fine literature.; 6/7/26, 7:14 PM
Lazarus said...: So he claimed anyway ...

One can devour a book without necessarily reading every word.; 6/7/26, 7:15 PM
Assistant Village Idiot said...: CS Lewis would do the same from any book in his Oxford library, and loved to challenge students to see if they could catch him up. There are people who can just do such things; 6/7/26, 7:45 PM
Josephbleau said...: In hs I was assigned to memorize the prolog to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. I can still say it today in perfect accent. You remember what you like, what you learn in reinforcement.; 6/7/26, 8:10 PM
Josephbleau said...: I am sure there are many in China who can recite verbatim from Mao’s red book.; 6/7/26, 8:13 PM
bagoh20 said...: I think I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but only in bell bottoms and tie dye.; 6/7/26, 8:22 PM
Josephbleau said...: For some reason I read “All Quiet on thr Western Front” at 10 and all my adult relatives thought I was a pervert. Çest la vie.; 6/7/26, 8:34 PM
Wince said...: Sure, but can he count dropped toothpicks instantly by sight?; 6/7/26, 10:14 PM
Jupiter said...: Inna-gadda-da-vida, baby!; 6/7/26, 10:46 PM
mccullough said...: Sounds like bullshit.; 6/7/26, 10:56 PM
Ampersand said...: I've met prodigiously talented people. Exceptional talents come with a cost. There seems to be a distance from others attributable to feeling one's own oddness.; 6/7/26, 10:57 PM
Tina Trent said...: Whatever. He was a serial liar about things that really counted.

That he could memorize everything only hurts his case as a human.; 6/8/26, 5:32 AM
Tina Trent said...: He hobnobbed with terrorists, at dinners with Obama in Chicago, and hated ordinary Americans. Yes, he was good at Moby Dick.

Typical gormless academician.; 6/8/26, 5:41 AM
narciso said...: I'll take allan bloom for a thousand; 6/8/26, 6:41 AM
Tina Trent said...: I'm not impressed with Dwight Garner. Can't the Times do better? And why not have an editor for fiction and one for non-fiction?; 6/8/26, 7:32 AM
narciso said...: Bring back zombie dwight mcdonald; 6/8/26, 7:40 AM
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said...: Harold Bloom reminds us that not all opinions are equal. Anyone who is serious about defeating populism must first fight for the principle that not all opinions are equal. That fight starts in culture. Give me the fogey over the nihilist.

What first strikes me about today’s nationalists is not their intolerance, but how unversed they often are in the culture they claim to cherish. Unless one is fixated on bloodlines, a nation’s distinctiveness lies in its cultural inheritance: its literature, art, music, and architecture. Even a jingoist, even an unpleasant one, should display a deep love and knowledge of these things. Yet I struggle to name a prominent nationalist in the contemporary West who does. These interlopers could learn a great deal from genuine Western traditionalists such as Harold Bloom.; 6/8/26, 8:57 AM
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said...: Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" opened my eyes thirty years ago. Glad you mentioned him.; 6/8/26, 9:12 AM
Hassayamper said...: In hs I was assigned to memorize the prolog to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. I can still say it today in perfect accent.

Yep me too. And some lines from Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon.

I do tend to trip up on the Prologue when I get to the bit about "palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowth in sondry londes", as most of its terms are now quite archaic if not totally obsolete, but I can speak and understand the rest perfectly well.; 6/8/26, 3:27 PM
FullMoon said...: "Kim Peek possessed an astonishing photographic memory and exceptional cognitive reading skills:Simultaneous Reading: He could read both pages of an open book at the same time. His left eye would read the left page, while his right eye read the right page.Extreme Speed: He could read a thick book and retain its contents in about an hour.Massive Information Storage: Over his lifetime, he memorized roughly 12,000 books with an information retention rate of about 98"

But he couldn't tie his own shoes or dress himself.; 6/8/26, 4:22 PM
Hassayamper said...: Yet I struggle to name a prominent nationalist in the contemporary West who does.

Not so fast, let's see who qualifies as a "prominent nationalist" in your reckoning, and exactly what they've said about those things.

If you include Tommy Robinson but exclude William Rees-Mogg, or include Donald Trump but exclude J.D. Vance, who was widely feted as a public intellectual before his political views became known, you're just dishonestly cherry-picking.

Outside the Anglosphere there are many more examples. Javier Milei is a noted opera fan, and both Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni have pushed for policies favoring classical music, accomplished artists, and other cultural influences from their respective national traditions, and weeding out leftist museum directors and librarians who were working to throw all that out and fill their institutions with celebrations of perverted sex, criminals, and hostile foreigners. Meloni cites Roger Scruton, who was as culturally literate and sophisticated as it is possible to be, as a major influence on her thinking. Going back a few years, Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa denied being a nationalist but was frequently accused of it by his left-wing enemies. He was certainly a strong voice for preservation of the Western cultural heritage writ large, and did more for the distinct national culture of Peru than any writer before.; 6/8/26, 5:52 PM