Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom would speak about the reader's sublime that's the pursuit of a difficult pleasure. If you find a particular work difficult then that is a good sign because as Adla reminds us in his How to Read a Book another great work we must read books that are over our heads. We can leave a lecture on the great poets with a headache I know I certainly do sometimes but we leave stronger more robust and hopefully after we've slept off that headache with a renewed vigor for life and literature. To Harold Bloom they were one and the same he didn't see a life without literature he did not see literature as an aid to living but saw literature as living itself.