In our post-Nietzschean age of AIDS and
rampant venereal disease, the remark now carries with it a certain unintentional irony, but one finishes reading Bloom's book not entirely sure why erotic relations nowadays are so dreary: Is it because of the relentless reductionism of Freud and Kinsey or because, as Nietzsche held, Eros and Institution will always be at war — and Christianity, with its rigorous stress on monogamy, now symbolizes for modern society the institution of marriage par excellence?