'Complicit in our own seduction'

    While I am the sole writer, editor, and proprietor of this blog, I'm not the only person who helps make it a success. Sometimes I forget that. Not only are there occasional contributors, such as my pals who helped tide me over after surgery, but there are readers whose comments point out errors and add valuable perspective. 

     Being a little abashed Sunday at not having read "Paradise Lost," I invited any readers who have read the book to share their thoughts. 

     I was impressed by the quality of the replies, particularly this email, which I found both interesting and beautiful, and will share with you in full. 

     Linda Clarke-Borre writes:

     Best wishes for a swift recovery. At least you are in a leafy suburban paradise. You mentioned Paradise Lost. It’s epic, and I thought you might appreciate a couple lessons I derived from reading it before life happened- and I began to understand…
     It’s a Puritan Epic for our times. Milton gives the Devil the best lines. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Milton, the failed revolutionary, writes his own fury into the fallen angel. (In Christian writings the Devil’s name is Lucifer — which means angel of light. Milton seduces readers into admiring his elaborate lies, making us complicit in our own seduction). 

     Then there’s heartfelt humanity of Adam and Eve. Their fall isn’t about an apple. It’s encoded in the conversation between them. Eve isn’t seduced by fruit, but by the flattery of her own reflection. Adam cannot bear to lose her. He looks at her and says, “She is my other self,” and chooses her over God. It’s the writing that is so moving; Milton makes you feel the bones of their relationship. When they hold hands and walk into a world of thorns, they are us.

     The third “thread” running through the epic story is the blind poet’s prayer. At the very beginning, Milton invokes a muse, calling on the Holy Spirit to illumine him, because he is blind. He can’t see the page, and dictates this entire epic to his daughters at night, as he asks God to be his inward eye. So when he describes the light of Heaven or murky Hell, he isn’t painting pictures; he is remembering light. Here, the poem becomes an act of radical faith, not in certainty, but in the very act of seeking. He dares to “justify the ways of God to men,” but in the end, he doesn’t justify them logically. He justifies them aesthetically, through the exquisite beauty of his verse. The poem is a glorious paradox: a Puritan epic about disobedience, a political tract that transcends politics, a tragedy that ends with hope. Every time I read the final lines—“They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way”—I am still much moved, not because they are punished. But because they are together.

     I don't know about you, but that makes me want to read the book.

William Blake