The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, and failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.

– Harold Bloom

Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.

Book preludes are underrated.

12 pages in and this book strikes like a thunderbolt.

Bloom, Harold. Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. pg 13