Oh well. There will be no reprieve until much later in the week. Of course, it doesn't help me much that I continually command my body and brain to run (at a pretty high level) on only 5 hours of sleep.
Yesterday, in between reading everything else that I had to read, I carried a copy of Paradise Lost and flipped through it whenever I got the chance. I don't know why I was craving it yesterday, but I just was. Kind of an odd craving to get, don't you think?
I had sort of forgotten how magnificent that poem is-- how enormous the figure of Satan, and how bitter. This images are marvelous.
He lights- if it were land that ever burned
With solid as the lake with liquid fire... (Book I, 229-230)
And Satan wonders why God allowed him to remain strong.
What can it then avail, though yet we feel
Strength undiminished or eternal being,
To undergo eternal punishment?
(Book I, 153-155)
But one of my absolute favorite parts has always been when Adam decides to taste the forbidden fruit. It's perfect (although it clearly places ALL of the stupidity of sin on women!). He knows it's wrong; Eve has not convinced him otherwise; But he decides to eat anyway, because he would rather go with her into whatever kind of darkness she will be cast, than to let her face her fate alone.
However, I with thee have fixed my lot
Certain to undergo like doom. If death
Consort with thee death is to me as life
So forcible within my heart I feel
The bond of nature draw me to my own
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine.
Our state cannot be severed. We are one.
One flesh: to lose thee were to lose myself.
(Book IX, 952-959)
It's rather morbid, but I can't help but think of the many accounts I've by now read for my Holocaust class in which individual members of a family passed up the opportunity to be saved, marching into hell in order to stay with their loved ones and not abandon them.
Human beings are amazing creatures.
Anyway, that's all I have time for now. I'm off to start my crazy day...
-h-
By the way, the illustration is by Edward Burney
3 comments:
So, is Paradise Lost related to The Inferno? Or do they just address similar matters of Satan and sin? I'm very ignorant of poetry.
In a completely unrelated matter, I'm now reading a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I've never read Lovecraft before but this is really good stuff.
Hi Hyde! I was so happy you came to visit me. Your is the first blog I read...so I am a fan, as it were.
Have you read the Brother's Karamasov? I think you might like it. One of my favorite parts has a character talking about how man chooses to be evil but is still in love with god and the idea of purity.
Dan- you're thinking of 'Paradiso' in the Divine Comedy. It has three parts, Paradiso, Purgatory and Inferno. Most people never read the other two prts though, because (as my favorite enlglish teacher put it) no one cares about paradise, we want to skip strait to hell.
It's a beautiful piece. I've never actually read the whole, but I like the pieces you pulled out.
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