Word: bloomings
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Professors participating included Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein '61, Kennedy School of Government Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr., Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West '74, School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom, and Harvard College Professor Michael J. Sandel...
...model of Platonic friendship: the younger, with physical beauty (nature's kiss), and the elder, with a developed life of the mind, conjoining in a discourse for their mutual pleasure. I am told that Bloom had these same, intense, friendships and was fascinated by male companionship in general. Ravelstein's own companion, a forty-years younger Chinese intellectual named Nikki, is fiercely devoted to him. And yet there are hints that Ravelstein couldn't live up to the Greek ideal-him, the mature erastes, doting on his loving, ephebic eromenae and enjoying their beauty...
...also wish I knew where Ravelstein's voracious and caustic conservatism originated. We get very little of Ravelstein's early life or formative academic experiences-the real-life Bloom, at one point, was nearly run out of Cornell at one point...
...book is about Allan Bloom. Nearly every reviewer-me included-reads the real life Allan Bloom where Bellow wrote Ravelstein. We can't disentangle the two, and I'm not sure we're supposed to. I find it interesting that Bellow has apologized publicly for revealing so much about Bloom's life. And the book's hesitancy is testament to this being a long-standing conflict for Bellow...
...portrait of Ravelstein is an accurate analogy, Bellow saw Allan Bloom as passionate, sexual, a lover of young (very young) men, guided as the Greeks were by moral aestheticism. And yet he was a firm contrarian, deplored action on impulse, and was convinced, almost mythically, of the steadiness of certain virtues and of the necessity of a reflective life...