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
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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.
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more from the online archives
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28.5—Sept/Oct 2015
on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson
32.6—November/December 2019
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs by Jesse Russell
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