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The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Lifeis a new book by Harold Bloom.¹Bloom at 82 is, arguably, the most famous American literary critic; he is also the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Bloom says that his theory of literature “was the offshoot of his own reading habits, principally his freakish capacity for memorization.

He discovered this ability to memorize in childhood, and it never left him. In the early 1960s, after hearing the prolific American poet W. S. Merwin’s poem Departure’s Girl-Friend, a poem of some 40 lines, he was able to repeat it verbatim.� “Even now,” he says, “I possess almost all of the poetry of one of my favorite poets, Hart Crane, by memory.”

The ability to grasp poetry in this way is rare but not unprecedented. Bloom’s hero, the English author Samuel Johnson(1709-1784), had this ability as well. “His memory was so tenacious,” Boswell writes in his great biography of Johnson, “that he never forgot anything that he either heard or read.” �One of Johnson’s schoolmates remembers having recited to him 18 verses which, after a little pause, he was able to repeat, varying only one epithet, by which he improved the line.”

The scientific study of memory is part of cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Some principles and techniques that have been used to assist in memorization include: rote learning, mnemonics, mnemonics link systems, peg systems, cramming, vedic chants, and oral traditions.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Sam Tanenhaus, Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader, �in The New York Times, May 20, 2011.

I had a good memory as a student

in primary and high school & was

able to go to the top of my class...,

but I was not in your league, Mr…

Bloom or Mr Johnson……I had to

work to get that information & facts

into my brain for future use usually

in exams: 99% perspiration and 1%

inspiration.� I am in a minor league,

a minor poet but, as the years went on

and my interests widened, I was able to

develop an architecture of information

in which to place a burgeoning quantity

of details as I headed through the stages

of adulthood and into old-age and its 3

phases: 65-74, 75-85 and beyond, if I

last that long!

Ron Price

26 June 2012

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Note: I have tired to edit-out all the capitalization, but could not figure-out how to do it.-Ron
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The Hebrew Bible, called The Old Testament by Christians, is an extraordinarily difficult sequence of books.¹ This difficulty, too easily underestimated, is greater now than it ever was, partly because no contemporary reader, however specialized, shares in the psychology of the original readers and writers of The Bible. The first millennium in which anyone read any of the words in any of the books from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ or, perhaps more accurately, 600 B.C. to 400 A.D.² �

My first memories of The Old Testament come from Bible readings in grade six when I was 11 and my mother reading passages from little booklets from the Unity School of Christianity as early as the mid-1950s. �Although some of the quotations had a broad ethical appeal to me even as a boy in my late childhood and early teens, I found the stories abstruse and distant: goats, sheep, tribes, and curious names like Balthazar and Nebuchadnezzar. They all occupied another universe far removed from my little town of 5000 in Ontario in that post-WW2 world of the 1950s. This distance existed then, as it does now, nearly 60 years later.

My individual understanding of The Bible, my biblical interpretations, rely primarily at the age of nearly 70 on my experience of nearly 60 years of intimate association with the Baha’i Faith. My interpretations and those of the Baha’i teachings are provocative, if nothing else.� But I have always found there to be a vast distance from the psychic universe of the biblical writers beginning as early as, say, 900 B.C.² and the contemporary society that is my world. I know I have lots of company; indeed I rarely meet anyone who actually reads The Old Testament any more.

However abstruse the language of biblical prophecy and eschatology, the prophets of The Old Testament, I believe, were given a foreknowledge of the events of our times in their visions, visions which I’m sure they hardly understood themselves.� �Still, there lies a sure presentation of the times we are living-through, as long as one does not take those prophecies literally.

Yahweh's choice of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants as part of the Chosen People story was a permanent decision, intended to prevail into a time without boundaries, into our time.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” in The New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’s THE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God, and ²the final editor, or redactor, after the return from the Babylonian Exile in the 6^th century BC, put all the books of The Old Testament into something like their present form.³

When this review appeared in¹

The New York TimesI had just

arrived in Australia’s Northern

Territory & the heat of summer

was just beginning to make me

run for cover to air-conditioning �

in my office, my home & the cool

air of the car....The Old Testament �

was on my universe’s far-periphery.

�

There it had always been in heat and

cold since those first stories when I

was in grade six in that little town in

Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe where

everyone I knew was Catholic or Jew

or Protestant, or nothing; yes, mostly

nothing and there they have remained

with that Old Testament far removed

from everyone’s everyday life. Still…

�

I have time now to try to get into it in

this the evening of my life; �however

complex and abstruse it may be, I want

to make-up for the decades when it had

to remain far out on my life’s periphery.

¹Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” inThe New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’sTHE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God.
³ See Frank Kermode, “God Speaks Through His Women,” in The New York Times, 23 September 1990: a review of Harold Bloom’s The Book of J.

Ron Price

5 July 2012

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