Hello Everyone!
I hope you enjoy this blog. Starting it has been an idea I’ve had for a few years now, but it wasn’t until I needed to craft a “creative project” for my very last undergraduate class on digital culture that I finally received the nudge I needed to begin (thank you Professor Wasserman!). I am the first to admit that I am not an intuitive inhabitant of the Internet Age, but I really enjoyed putting this blog together, and I hope that I will hear from people out there in the World Wide Web who might also have a passion for John Milton’s great epic.
As I said, I will have graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in May of 2016. I started back to school when my son was young and have been working my way very slowly toward this English degree for many years. In hindsight, I think I was very blessed to take my classes at such a leisurely pace. I got the chance to really absorb and savor them, and I have to admit that I enjoyed them all—even the ones I was not so good at (like math and science).
As I look back over the years, some classes were particularly important to me. A Biblical and Classical Literature class introduced me to Homer, and as I read The Odyssey and The Iliad, I was enchanted. Even better, an off hand remark by the professor (thank you Professor Cotsell) pointing out that these works were even better in the original language gave me the idea to take up Ancient Greek as my college language requirement. I found that I loved all things ancient—language, culture, literature.
A few years after reading Homer, I took a general Renaissance literature class and was introduced to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and again I was blindsided. It was quite a challenge to even read it with elegance, and I had to rely on the footnotes heavily to understand the references, and then there was the density of the verse and imagery! But even with those obstacles, I loved every line, and to this day, I remember thinking for the first time that perhaps there were people over the course of history who tapped into some transcendent realm —and John Milton was one of them.
In fact, I enjoyed Paradise Lost so much that I took a self-directed course to immerse myself in it. That course turned out to be the best one of my entire university career (many thanks to Dr. Kristin Poole). My project for Paradise Lost was to compose a collection of essays examining what I loved about the epic. When the course was completed, I pulled the essays together into an iBook–which I envisioned my grandchildren enjoying one day, though my son’s chuckles at that idea. If anyone would like to purchase my book, please send a comment below. I have some example pages (just like Amazon!–but with more humility) under the Store menu.
Digression
During the self-study course I read John Rogers’ The Matter of Revolution, which is where the kernel of my second blog began. I was fascinated by how the worldview of Milton’s era was so different from ours. Later, Professor Poole pointed out that I was groping for the term “epistimology”: how we humans understand and organize our world. With this CulturalArchipelago.com, which focuses on how we humans form communities. In the course of forming communities, world views, which encompasses the blend of politics, art, philosophy, science, and religion, etc., became an idea interestingly examined through the study of speculative literature, which is so sensitive those constructs where the “center cannot hold” and where alarms inspire authors to creatively anticipate trouble ahead.