Blogging

I thought it would be a lot easier than it has been keeping up with my posting while I've been reading the Bible. Last week I read Matthew and thought about some things, but I didn't have time to make them into a coherent post that fits my word limit. Oh well. One of the parts of my resolution was not to feel guilty about failing, haha.

This week I picked up C. S. Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost. I've been feeling more and more malnourished in my English classes this semester, and it is really difficult to put a finger on why I seem to disagree with my professors on almost every level, even about technical points of the text that seem fairly obvious. But then Lewis came in and, with a kind of clarity I had almost given up hope of ever finding again outside the Bible, named what was happening inside my mind:

"Dr. Leavis does not differ from me about the properties of Milton's epic verse. He describes them very accurately...It is not that he and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton's poetry, but about the nature of man, or even the nature of joy itself."

It seems to me that the study of literature, and probably that of philosophy as well, is uniquely frustrating, because in it, personal, private beliefs that do not factor into other disciplines at all apparently color every interpretation of even the tiniest phrase. If I do not agree with my professor about something as seemingly irrelevant as the internal coherency of the Bible, I become an outsider in a conversation about Milton's sonnets.

I was starting to think I have just lost interest in the discipline in general, but then I found what C. S. Lewis wrote about Mr. John Milton and reading it was a delight! In large part because C. S. Lewis retains the old-fashioned belief that the poet's purpose is to teach as well as to create "art." Nowadays, people try to use poetry to do all kinds of crazy things: purify language and society, experiment with syntax and its effects on human experience, make sentences that are like cats, and capture the historical moment of our civilization. If that's what poetry does, then I don't like it very much. I can believe in a poetry that exists in order to help people experience how good things, like the sun, really are good and bad things, like self-love, even though they might feel good at first, actually lead to death. But that function is apparently too simple for the current complexity of the information age.