ALLAN BLOOM: Opening the American Mind

‘SO, what do you think about Me?” asked Allan Bloom, audibly capitalizing the personal pronoun and laughing like a big delighted child at the hornet’s nest of trouble he’d stirred up. Since the publication of The Closing of the American Mind (1987) his name had been on everyone’s lips, and whether they had read it or not-and most people hadn’t-everyone was expected to have an opinion about it.

I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1987, but I had spent the previous year at Chicago, where I took courses with Bloom on Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. A tall, top-heavy figure in an elegant double-breasted suit, he strode restlessly up and down the room, an open book in one hand and a smoldering Dunhill in the other. With his elbows high against his ribs like flightless wings and his spectacles clipped to the ridge of his prominent nose, he looked like Milton Berle incongruously cast as a character in a French drawing-room farce. He smoked continuously, talking and joking and waving his hands in the air, while his ash grew to perilous lengths. The students sat transfixed as much by the tension of waiting for the dangling ash to fall as by the brilliance of the lecture.

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Adam Bellow

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‘SO, what do you think about Me?” asked Allan Bloom, audibly capitalizing the personal pronoun and laughing like a big delighted child at the hornet’s nest of trouble he’d stirred up. Since the publication of The Closing of the American Mind (1987) his name had been on everyone’s lips, and whether they had read it or not-and most people hadn’t-everyone was expected to have an opinion about it.

I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1987, but I had spent the previous year at Chicago, where I took courses with Bloom on Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. A tall, top-heavy figure in an elegant double-breasted suit, he strode restlessly up and down the room, an open book in one hand and a smoldering Dunhill in the other. With his elbows high against his ribs like flightless wings and his spectacles clipped to the ridge of his prominent nose, he looked like Milton Berle incongruously cast as a character in a French drawing-room farce. He smoked continuously, talking and joking and waving his hands in the air, while his ash grew to perilous lengths. The students sat transfixed as much by the tension of waiting for the dangling ash to fall as by the brilliance of the lecture.