quote · Words worth keeping
Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.
Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.
Approximate author period: c. 1974 AD · modern
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- Author or tradition
- Harold Bloom
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1974 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from life dates 1930 to 2019; Wikidata Q345612, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q345612 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 327731; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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