Last week I flew from Santa Fe to Denver, and towards the middle of the trip I looked down. Below were mountains with sharp crests, outlined by a sprinkling of snow. The white line appeared on the eastern edge of range after range. I’m not familiar with the local area, but assume that the wind comes over the plains and drops all its moisture on the eastern slopes of these hills/mountains. The side with the delicate snow outline was also the side with greenery, tracing its way down. Denver is out on the plains in front of the Rockies, so we left this beautiful sight behind before we landed. 

While I was in Santa Fe, and even before I got there, I was working madly on reading Paradise Lost, John Milton’s last poem, written after he had gone blind. I had to go look him up since I knew nothing of his life. I discovered that Cromwell liked him, but so did John Dryden. He was married three times and believed in divorce. However, though he wrote about divorce when his first wife ran away, she came back and they had children. He married again only when his wife, whoever she was at the time, died.

I’ve read the first five books out of twelve for Paradise Lost, and, now that I’ve gotten my own book back in my head, I can spare the energy to finish it. 

One of the reasons I’m sure I should finish is that Milton is full of quotations. Lol. I mean, people quote him more often than I thought. Dorothy Sayers quotes him twice at least, once in Busman’s Honeymoon, when she introduces Puffet, the chimney sweep. Wimsey looks at him and says, “Black it stood as night … and shook a dreadful dart.” (Chapter 2, PL) Somewhere else, Milton is quoted, “He for God only, she for God in him.” (Chapter 4, PL) I don’t remember the context for this one in Sayers; I don’t think Harriet was approving of it though she was part of the conversation. And I must say I didn’t care for this quote at all myself. 

But after managing to avoid Milton for years, I tripped over him twice since last week. Anthony Esolen did a translation of Dante so I kind of pay attention to him. He has written a new book, No Apologies, Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. I took a look on Amazon, and paragraph #3, from the Look Inside feature, is about a conversation that Adam and the angel, Rafael, have in Paradise Lost.

I also read a book, Waterwalk, by Steven Faulkner, Creative Writing professor at Longwood University. It’s about a father and son, (actually Faulkner and his own son) canoeing in the wake of the explorers, Father Marquette and Louis Joliet. Part One has a verse to set everything going, 

“… ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded …” Paradise Lost, no chapter given.

And at the end, Part Five has another quote. 

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, 

Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat 

That we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom 

For that celestial light?   Paradise Lost, again no chapter given. (But I’m guessing this quotation is near the beginning of the poem …) 

So suddenly, I’m feeling a little pushed to read the BOOK! Also, my former student has promised to send me his essay, when he writes one on Paradise Lost. So I’ve got to be ready. I’m going to lay out what I already read, and didn’t like. Then I will see if I change my mind after reading the whole poem.

Satan is the narrator for a lot of the beginning. I did eventually appreciate the idea that he might be unreliable. Meantime, he suggests that if the devils had just pushed a little harder they might have beaten God. He also says that he rebelled against God when it turned out that God had a Son, whom the devils were expected to worship. Worshipping one God was bad enough, two was impossible. There’s a kind of theological failure here, obviously. It continues with the idea that the battle for Heaven is going badly until — not Michael — but God the Son, intervenes. He is the one who defeats Satan, and banishes a third of Heaven. 

There’s a long discussion of why God should save humans and not the devils. The general impression I got was that the devils just fell without help, but humanity was tempted, so they can be offered salvation. This is not what I was taught but then, Milton isn’t Catholic. 

There is a confusion about whether the tree that Adam and Eve are forbidden is the Tree of Knowledge, or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is a considerable, a huge, difference. I’ve met people who think it is Knowledge that was proscribed, and they justify evil on the basis that Knowledge is always good. Yes, really. 

I read up to the moment where Satan is slithering around Adam and Eve, having nobly offered to leave Hell and go find this new universe of Human. He tricks the angel who is guarding the place into letting him in to wreak havoc. (I really like Dante’s conception of heavenly creatures much better. They are always in contact with God.) 

Onward! But not right now.