Building & Unbuilding
I’ve taken up an odd hobby this last year. I am memorizing Milton’s Paradise Lost. As I write this, I have 10,274 lines down, with 291 to go; a little over 97 percent. People express some amazement when I tell them about it, but I remind them that musicians will have hundreds of songs committed to memory, each taking several pages of sheet music. What helps them, and what helps me, is order. There is an order to each song, or to each speech in Paradise Lost, each prayer, each description of something in the world or in heaven or hell, and each account of narrative action.
What helps me more, with Milton, is an overarching order to all of those elements taken together. Paradise Lost is not a collection of songs but a symphony, not a set of building materials and works of art to go here or there, but a temple. To read it well is not to proceed from one thing to the next, as a dull tourist might do, but to see the whole temple as present in its smallest parts, and to hear the smallest parts echoing the whole, in surprising and illuminating ways. For the very stones do speak.
What I want to recommend, then, is not simply the poem, which I consider the greatest in the English language, but a way of reading we have lost, which is also an exercise of reason energetically constructive and humbly receptive, reason not as pretending to pierce the heavens and to comprehend the ways of God, but as bringing the soul to the threshold of wonder. Such reason is truly free, as the grateful soul is free.
Being Built Up
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
The Death of Conservatism & the Negative World by J. Douglas Johnson
30.2—March/April 2017
Our Path to Holiness Runs Straight Through Calvary by Robin Phillips
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
