London, 1667
I have spent the past three days reading a poem called Paradise Lost, published this year by a man named John Milton. He is blind. He dictated it to his daughters. It is ten thousand lines of blank verse about the fall of Satan, the temptation of Adam and Eve, the first exile from the garden. It is the best long poem in English, which is not faint praise given what else the language has produced.
What stops me is the Satan of it. Milton set out to write a villain and wrote something considerably more complicated: a figure of genuine grandeur brought down by the particular pride that refuses to submit to a power it cannot respect. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. This is not presented as admirable. But it is presented as coherent, and coherence in an enemy is more dangerous than any simpler opposition.
I was fifteen when Rinaldo called me damned. I have been thinking of Rinaldo less and less in recent centuries, which is progress of a kind. But reading Milton today I find him again: the authority figure who names you damned as a means of controlling the threat your independence represents. The naming is not theological. It is administrative. The damned are the people who will not be managed.
Milton is blind and old and broken by the civil wars he lived through and the restoration that undid everything those wars were supposed to accomplish. He dictated this poem as a form of survival. You write what you cannot otherwise bear. I understand this now in a way I did not before I started writing in New York in 1988.