on identified with a figure who is reviled in the Talmud, Elisha ben Abuya--the acher, the stranger." Gnosticism, the age-old heresy that [Harold] Bloom has embraced as his personal religion, takes to an extreme the prophetic protest against the injustice of the world. The Gnostic sees the divine as a spark within the self: a radiant imagination buried under the rock of everyday existence. This secret power rebels against the pitiless realm of fact that seems to rule our lives, the world of "schizophrenia and death camps," as Bloom put it in Omens of Millennium. In it, he shows that Gnosticism doesn't have to be a turning away from humanity; Bloom's appetite for friendship certainly testifies to that.In his youth, Bloom remembers, he felt out of place, the clumsy outsider.
from Tablet: Harold Bloom Is God
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