Paradise Lost
Or at least losing...
My original intention on picking up my metaphorical pen to start this essay was to set out my perspective that in a month in which years are happening - from the US Presidential Nobel Peace Prize aspirant deciding that starting one war might improve his chances of said prize more than (apparently) ending seven, to the miserable spectacle of a human fox hunt as the erstwhile Duke of York is run to ground and slowly savaged by a global media pack, a savaging which to this observer appears only assuageable through an ultimate blood sacrifice - and in which everyone is expected (and permitted) to have at least two entirely contradictory opinions on Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Gold, Inflation, the US-Dollar, the mid term elections, the end of Europe, the rise of China, BRICs, Russia, the shadow banking system, and whether or not America has enough ammunition or Germany enough liquid gas to make it to Easter. My perspective, to which I was fully intending to devote an entire essay, was, actually is, that none of these things matter. What matters — imho, OK not so ho - I surmise, is the intensity with which events, dear boy, are happening and what that intensity tells us about the point in our history at which we now find ourselves. In our urge to make sense of the noise - an impossible task guaranteed to absorb every cell of our frontal cortex - we are apt to forget that the sounds themselves are far less important than decibels and the intensity of the cacophony they combine to produce. The cacophony, in other words, is the message.
So, I was in the frame of mind to look for apposite literary covering fire for my hypothesis and my mind, as it is won’t to do, went straight to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Satan’s speech to his luciferian troops assembled in Chaos, readying them for the epic battle with God and the Angels. Something along the lines of
“My sentence is for open war: of wiles
More inexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in arms, and longing wit
The signal to ascend, sit lingering here
heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place
Accept this dark opprobrious den of shame,
The prison of his tyranny who reigns
By our delay? No! let us rather choose,
Arm’d with Hell flames and fury, all at once
O’er Heaven’s high towers to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his almighty engine he shall hear
Infernal thunder, and for lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels…”Paradise Lost Book I ~ John Milton
Stirring stuff and terrifying if you happen to be on the other side of it. I have a sense that the self-evident decay of the system under which many, probably most of us have grown up is now too obvious for even the most intransigent to ignore. Weak men (and women - looking at you specifically Frau von der Leyen and Ms Kallas) making bad times which are now ineluctably upon us. Satan’s host feels very much as if it is on the march already. Consequently, I don’t think it helps us much to opine on whether the US will achieve its objectives in Iran (remind me again, what are they?) or whether they have ever achieved any of their foreign policy objectives since the Marshall Plan or what this means for Russia or whether Mr. Epstein was indeed the Grandmaster of the Illuminati or just their private banker or any of the other questions which increasingly occupy the overpopulated and certainly intellectually overtaxed talking heads: we are moving into the denouement phase of post war socialism sold to us as liberal democracy and to the breakage of a system built on rotten money, whose ultimate objective was always its own absolute degradation. We have bigger fish to fry. The noises of war, distraction, corruption, accompanied by the creaking elicited from the erosion of bourgeois standards of normative behaviour and morals, managed by incompetents and ideologues whose only instinct is strip mine the trust and infrastructure built by previous generations are the easily extrapolatable outcomes we now witness. Not problems to be solved - it’s too late for that - but falling masonry to be avoided, preferably from a hill top in the distance.
That is what I was going to write about.
However when I pulled out my 1991 copy of the Folio Society’s “Paradise Lost” with its beautiful William Blake illustrations, I didn’t get much further than the Introduction, a magnificent piece of writing by the Miltonian fan boy, Professor John Wain taken from his essay “Strength and Isolation” (1960) where it served as the opening contribution in a 1960 book titled The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, edited by the eminent literary critic Sir Frank Kermode.
John Barrington Wain (1925–1994) was a prominent English poet, novelist, and literary critic. He is heavily associated with “The Movement,” a group of 1950s British writers—including Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis—who favored a straightforward, anti-romantic, and formally disciplined approach to literature over the modernist experimentation of previous decades. I could explain what arcane aspects of literary philosophy those various terms refer to, but your life will not be substantially enriched by the information. The magnificently named John Wain is famous for his 1953 comic novel Hurry on Down (which often gets him grouped with the “Angry Young Men” generation of British novelists), he was equally respected as a formidable academic. He was an Oxford graduate who taught at the University of Reading and later held the highly prestigious post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, as a fellow of Brasenose College from 1973 to 1978. The Folio Society “Paradise Lost”, of which I have an excellent copy, brought this otherwise obscure but brilliantly articulate academic to a broader public just before his passing three years later.
Instead of a long diatribe on the pointlessness of trying to figure out “the truth” of our current world in turmoil, I figured that you would be infinitely better served by reading an extract from Professor Wain’s truly wonderful essay in which he sets out his reasoning for his Christian faith and his belief in the Divine. His perspective is essentially mine, but better articulated and with more lightness of spirit and generosity of intellect that I could muster. William Blake once wrote “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.”, as clear a call for having the intellectual courage to go figure stuff out for yourself as it is possible to articulate. This Truth is far more consequential than any other narrative truth that you might be otherwise grappling with. I do hope you enjoy it.
