Toronto, Ontario
October 3, 2000

Dear David:

The only other time I tried to read Paradise Lost – John Milton's late-Renaissance rendering of the Fall of Man, the greatest epic poem in the English language, the anvil of words upon which every subsequent poem has been forged, the only contender to Shakespeare's greatness, quite possibly the most profound meditation on good and evil ever written – I managed exactly 125 lines, or less than 1 per cent of the endlessly acclaimed masterpiece, in six months. I kept falling asleep at

So spake th'apostate angel, though in pain....

But this summer, while everyone else was out having a good time and the world seemed to be an oversold, venal, thoughtless, cramped and unwashed place, I decided to try something difficult, for a change, and read one of the all-time monster brain-crackers of Serious Literature, from start to finish.

I borrowed a shack in the Pocono Mountains of northern Pennsylvania and packed one copy of Paradise Lost and two T-shirts. No telephone, no TV, no one.

Strange coincidences sprang up almost immediately. In the notebook I grabbed as I rushed from my house, I found the words to "Ripple," by the Grateful Dead, copied out in my wife's neat and efficient hand:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down; the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung.

Somehow that sentiment didn't seem foreign to the theme of Paradise Lost. Nor did the eight-hundred-mile blight of endless Big Boys, Price Choppers, and McDonald's restaurants that line the road from Toronto to Pennsylvania. Everywhere I looked I saw former paradises. Finally in Scranton I saw a sign that said "A Good Place to Start Feeling Better," so I checked into a hotel. It was a Day's Inn, and was itself next to a Price Chopper and a McDonald's. A trucker and his wife were having a private barbecue in the parking lot. That was nice, and so was the hickory smoke coming up off his portable hibachi. "Tired?" the guy at the check in said. "Get some rest." The door of my room wore a sign:

I lay on the bed and listened to the trucks vibrating by on the highway, vibrating on to everywhere but where I was. I turned on the radio, and a voice said, "Who says you can't eat the food you want and still lose weight? Just use Fat Whacker! And be careful not to lose too much weight!" I turned off the radio and turned on the TV. A blond weatherperson on a local newscast smiled out of the set at me as she bantered with her fellow newscasters. "Mother's Day is a week away," she said, "so if you haven't bought a present to show your mother your respect, there's still time to do so. Storms to come."

I turned off the TV, and cracked open Paradise Lost.

All Miltonists – and there are many of them; they tend to be detail weenies, to be terrifyingly well-read, to love marathon readings of the text, and to be able to cite lines from memory by book and line number – end up debating one question: Whose side is Milton on? Grumpy God's (as C. S. Lewis believed), the side of subjugation of the self and salvation? Or silky Satan's (as William Blake famously insisted), the casino world where you can be you, but entirely on your own?

God seems to have the upper hand, at least as the poem opens, with Satan dazed and face-up in a lake of fire, after Mr. Big Stuff hurls him from Heaven for being uppity. It's a promising start, very sci-fi. But God quickly becomes a wooden bore and a martinet.

Satan, on the other hand, is for most of us in the twenty-first century a (frighteningly) pleasant ball of charm. For all his lack of empathy and his tireless schemes to overthrow Heaven, Satan shows some class. He never apologizes, never makes excuses for himself. "To bow and sue for grace/With suppliant knee...That were an ignominy and shame beneath this downfall." Satan turns out to be a combination of Bill Clinton and Wile E. Coyote, insisting he's never done anything anybody with a little ambition wouldn't do.

Life in Eden, by contrast, resembles a Soviet propaganda film from the 1950s extolling the virtues of happy blond life on the collective. Not only do Adam and Eve have to obey God; God, the Ultimate Bossy Boots, constantly reminds them they have to be obedient.

Is it any wonder Eve ate the apple?

One night, deep into Book Nine (the only chapter of twelve that actually happens in anything like what screenwriters call "real time"), I went for dinner to a local bar. The Pines Tavern was a typical Pennsylvania highway joint, festooned with yellow flags hailing Coors beer and blue flags touting the Philadelphia Eagles. I later learned my late father-in-law drank himself to death there. Three couples in their sixties were sitting at an oak bar, drinking and flirting and laughing while choking to death ("We're hell-raising! Heh heh heh heh heh heeuuuaaallllllggghhh") – the usual rituals of the post-industrial American Dream. It was the perfect setting to read one of the classics of Western literature.

The waitress recommended the broasted chicken. "It's actually a lot better than roasted," she said. I thought that meant broiled and roasted, hence healthier. In fact the bird had been breaded, then roasted, and looked like lumps of slag from a recently cooled planet. I stabbed a piece and turned back to Paradise Lost.

As I say, it was the crux of the action. Satan had turned himself into a serpent, and now "the wily adder, blythe and glad" was trying to convince Eve to eat an apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.

"Some good homework?" the waitress said, writing out my cheque.

"Just a project." I flipped the book to show her the cover. A mistake, I realized instantly.

"Ooo-kay," she said. "You're thinking way too much."

"Actually," I said, "I'm probably not thinking enough."

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry."

I was about to get up when a loud new talk show appeared on the TV screen above the bar. The show consisted of young men talking about the times they'd thrown up. Then they called out to some busty girls in Dutch peasant costumes who were serving steins of beer to the studio audience. "Juggies!!" the men called. That was the name of the costumed girls. "Dance us out to commercial!"

That was when I left. Reading Paradise Lost can make you feel that way, especially at first – ashamed somehow, as if you belong nowhere in the modern world.

But more, as Milton says, ere next morn,

Ian