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Rating: 
Summary: Wake up call
Review: Ditt
Rating: 
Summary: Romantics and Gnostics should die young
Review: Harold Bloom, as I imagine most everyone reading this review knows, made his mark with a work of almost unbelievable insight and genius, The Visionary Company. In it, Bloom effectively disemboweled and laid to rest the dried up "New Criticism" and "Neo-Classicism" that was in the ascendant at the time. He did no less than knock T.S. Eliot off his critical pedestal: a dragon-slayer indeed! The Visionary Company took its title from a line in a Yeats' poem referring to several poets (some, like Lionel Johnson, of exquisite merit) who shunned material success and followed their own visionary and masterful style of poetry and ended up dying young, drunk and destitute. (L. Johnson, for example was such a classical languages genius that he was offered a position at Oxford when he was barely over 20! Instead, he decided to pen his masterful poetry while drinking himself to death. He died after falling off a barstool at around the age of 30).- The full line from the Yeats' poem is "I would be one with the visionary company."-But the reader will take note that neither Yeats nor Bloom consumed himself with his genius in such a way. This, in Bloom's case, is somewhat unfortunate (I'm not going to delve into Yeats here.). After The Visionary Company, his prolific works can be graphed onto a parabolic downward swoop ending with this book...In the middle of said swoop, you can find works such as The Western Canon which, while idiosyncratic and a touch pompous and presumptuous(understatement?), still makes one catch one's breath at times at the profundity of the insights contained therein....But OK, first of all, Omens of Millenium is not truly Bloom's book at all, but a kitschy rip-off of The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas (Note how many times Jonas is mentioned in Bloom's book.). The problem is that Jonas was a painstaking scholar and wrote as such, and most readers will find him inaccessible to some extent, just as some readers found The Visionary Company. SOOO, Bloom solves everything by writing this nice little book relating Gnosticism to Western literature...Right?....Wrong!!...Bloom himself is guilty of what he dismisses the New Agers and such for: ill-informed boot-licking of the mass culture's obsession with all sorts of ridiculous things.-Sorry Harold, if you can't take it, don't dish it out.-My advice to readers is just to go back and read any of the great Romantic poets. They and the Gnostics are essentially the same on a spiritual level, and the writings of the poets are much more beautiful.-But please go ahead and check out Hans Jonas if you really are interested in the historical and technical aspects of this fascinating worldview.
Rating:
Summary: Wake up call
Review: Omens of Millennium is a personal and erudite synthesis of Gnosticism, Hermetism, Sufism, and Jewish Kabbalah (and Emersonism). Prof. Bloom writes with the conviction of a "believer" and the rigor of a disinterested scholar. I first read this book three years ago and since then I have come back to it in many occasions. Omens of Millennium is a wake-up call to Knowledge. The book also introduced me to the extraordinary works of Hans Jonas, Mose Idel, and Henry Corbin.
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Summary: Think On This
Review: While I disagree with Bloom on a great many topics, his opinions are always thoughtful and challenging. Such is the case with this book which, to me, represents an acme of such thought before the millennium. His ideas, of course, are far more refined and careful than your average streetside shaman but a proof of the point that all such thought on angels, resurrection, and magic is superfluous; the trophy of our imaginations.
In early 2000, after the roaring crashes of worldwide electronic mayhem, the second coming of Jesus, and our long awaited deliverance from the mire of this world we should reconsider the prophetic tone of this work. Just kidding. As we all know, January 1, 2000 was no different than any other day nor will there be any supernatural interventions into world history. World history has been, is, and always will be a history of geology and protoplasm engaged in the evolution of species. The quote from Durrell that opens Bloom's book is terrible and true--there is no supernature behind all this hubbub. Shall we then drift into our wildest imaginings: ancestral mythology, Christian sci-fi and the like? Or shall we create a new philosophy of man? Find out Bloom's answer by reading this interesting book.
Rating:
Summary: Think On This
Review: While I disagree with Bloom on a great many topics, his opinions are always thoughtful and challenging. Such is the case with this book which, to me, represents an acme of such thought before the millennium. His ideas, of course, are far more refined and careful than your average streetside shaman but a proof of the point that all such thought on angels, resurrection, and magic is superfluous; the trophy of our imaginations.
In early 2000, after the roaring crashes of worldwide electronic mayhem, the second coming of Jesus, and our long awaited deliverance from the mire of this world we should reconsider the prophetic tone of this work. Just kidding. As we all know, January 1, 2000 was no different than any other day nor will there be any supernatural interventions into world history. World history has been, is, and always will be a history of geology and protoplasm engaged in the evolution of species. The quote from Durrell that opens Bloom's book is terrible and true--there is no supernature behind all this hubbub. Shall we then drift into our wildest imaginings: ancestral mythology, Christian sci-fi and the like? Or shall we create a new philosophy of man? Find out Bloom's answer by reading this interesting book.
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