Milton and World-Building

I have an old paperback edition of Paradise Lost sitting around, and I pick it up and read a page or two from time to time. Milton is one of the few acknowledged great English poets I've never taken a shine to. Nothing about Satan's grandeur appeals to me. If all the powers and potentates of Heaven and Hell have to do is make speeches of elaborate self-justification, then I'd rather poke along here in the middle kingdom and watch a beetle negotiate a tuft of grass. Who cares about all their bombast and swagger?

And then there are the weird discontinuities. The world-building, as kids like to say these days, is comically inconsistent and contrived. Having Death and Sin walk around with the same ontological status as Lucifer and Jesus, not to mention as the Creator himself? How is that supposed to work? The world dangling on a string? The invocation of a Greek muse on a Hebrew stage? And if Milton really thinks that this God is the creator of the world, and of himself, how dare he stuff His mouth with his own words? I mean that literally: you would think that even the most naive and unreflective of Christians would recognize that they're not up to writing a script for God.

Yet Milton is neither naive nor blasphemous in intent, and he's no teenager. He's a man who's taken enormous real risks and played a key part in the great events of his time. His learning is (a little too obviously) immense. What is he playing at?

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I'm uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We're making them up. They're for visiting, not for living in.

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Meditating on that, I realize that I'm engaged in the same thing as my children. I'm holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He's writing a poem, and he's drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he's not that arrogant. He's a man writing a poem, that's all. He's not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he's unsophisticated, It's that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

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I have Milton's Sonnet 19 by heart, so it's not true that he's never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I'm old enough in reading to know that its not Milton's deficiency but mine that I'm dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I'll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Waking up Worried

I woke at four, worried that yesterday I had reassured my daughter about the political future badly and wrongly. No more sleep after that. I dutifully counted 150 breaths, in hopes that sheer boredom would get me back to sleep, but it didn't. But anyway I want to get up earlier, if not quite this early, so hey. Here I am.

I get so muddled nowadays, I have so many thoughts about the future, and sorting the true from the false and the useful from the useless is difficult, even before you get to trying to evaluate whether the problem might be thinking about the future at all. We're trained to think about the future as princes, and we are not princes. We are peasants, and we will take what get, and do our best with it. 

Being old helps a little, because I know now that almost nothing I was worried about forty years ago was the right thing to be worried about. We think we know way more about the future than we do; we're O so clever. "If things keep on going this way, then..." but things don't. They speed up; they slow down, they evoke overwhelming opposition; or they are fixed by "small hands that do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." Or they are swamped by things still worse and yet unimagined in the womb of time (but that is not one of the ways to reassure your daughter.)

Still, in the run-up to the disastrous election of 2016, though the polls were looking good, my heart misgave me. I was pretty sure Trump was going to win. And now though the polls put it a knife-edge, my heart is easier. I think this time he will probably lose. Which is evidence of nothing, of course. But nothings are sometimes the appropriate medicine for imaginary illnesses.

On the other hand, the bizarre fantasy entertained by both Left and Right in this country, that the opposition is somehow imaginary and ephemeral, and one good election will make it go away, is one of the main problems. We keep not really taking the other side seriously, because we're convinced that it's not really there, people couldn't really be so awful. Surely we'll wake up and they will turn out to have been just a nightmare? And surely we are not part of the problem, heavens no, our virtue is complete and perfect and the other side fears us totally, totally unreasonably.

I say that not because I think the sides are morally equivalent. I don't at all. But we are equally negligent of our political duty to engage with each other. We have already paid heavily for that, and we will pay even more heavily, because we have not the slightest intention of changing anything about ourselves. Anything. At. All.