Follow ups from today

The outline of Paradise Lost which we talked about today can be found here.

Here's Milton's Nativity Ode, (here's the Dartmouth edition) where some of his lifelong themes (e.g., the twilight of the pagan gods) are first sounded, and here is John Rogers' talk on it.

Regarding the thought that Reason in a sense was Satan's prompter, here's the passage from Book I - it's the only time the word appears in Book I.

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

Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat

That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom

For that celestial light? Be it so, since he [ 245 ]

Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid

What shall be right: fardest from him is best

Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream

Above his equals.

Toward the end of his first lecture, Rogers suggests that Satan is practicing much the same sort of deconstruction of divine power that is often applied in cultural studies and social sciences to other large concepts and fundamental ideas:

Satan's saying that before the war in heaven, God's power just seemed like any other king's power, as if God sat on the throne of heaven merely because of those humanly constructed reasons of tradition, or of old repute or consent or custom.

As Lola reminded us, Milton was quite consciously on Satan's side as he argued, through several public writings, that the "divine right of kings" was basically a power play tricked out in Charles I's monarchic dress.

Umberto Eco on Lists

As we know from Homer, Genesis, Rabelais, Joyce and many other writers, vast lists and catalogs have exercised a certain fascination even prior to the advent of writing.

The superb Italian scholar and novelist is curating a show at the Louvre about lists, and was recently interviewed by Der Spiegel:

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity?

The list doesn't destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century.. . .

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position.. . .

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Update: Harvard Berkman Center scholar David Weinberger triggers an interesting discussion as he takes issue with certain of Eco's assertions.