The aura of election  

I've been wondering where this alleged pickup line of Harold Bloom's comes from. Presumably it's a literary reference (I'd be hugely disappointed in Bloom if it weren't), but there isn't much to go by on the internet. A Google search for the phrase only comes up with one instance, from John Howard Yoder, who in all likelihood also refers to a previous source.

Interestingly, Naomi Wolf has used the phrase before, in her book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (1997):

I had heard some rumors about his way of relating to certain of his female students, but there were rumors about half a dozen teachers on campus. Sometimes, when one young woman who had taken the professor's course was introduced to another, she would say, in a deep, slow, ironic voice, "You have the aura of election upon you." It was the code.

Apparently the book (which I haven't read — this quote comes via Amazon) is mostly memoir; the above passage comes from such a section. It doesn't clearly support these latest allegations, but Wolf certainly had something in mind when she wrote those words, something she meant us to read as deeply personal. To me, it has the aura of plausibility upon it: this is the way authors talk about themselves.