“The pseudo-Gothic was much ridiculed, and nobody builds like that anymore. It is not authentic, not an expression of what we are, so it was said. To me it was and remains an expression of what we are. One wonders whether the culture critics had as good an instinct about our spiritual needs as the vulgar rich who paid for the buildings.” — Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. Reading the book again after so many years I find it deeply wrong-headed, and yet also full of wonderful passages, as for example this one about how as a fifteen-year-old freshman he fell in love with the University of Chicago.