"Bloom takes us from the Bible through the twentieth century, searching for the ways literature can inform our lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, Plato and Homer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Bacon, Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, and finally discussions of the Gospel of Thomas and Saint Augustine, he distills for us the various - and even contrary - forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking."--BOOK JACKET.