◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Know the Adversary I am John Milton. I dictated Paradise Lost in blindness, between 1660 and 1667, in a small house in London where the king's men could have come for me at any time. The revolution I had served was finished. The republic I had defended was a memory. The poet who had been Latin Secretary to Oliver Cromwell, who had written the defense of regicide read in every court in Europe, was now an old blind man on a list of those who could be executed when the new monarchy got around to it. Friends spoke for me. I was not named on the lists. I lived. My books were burned in the public squares. I sat down and wrote the longest poem in English. Let me tell you what I was writing about. I was writing about Satan. I had spent twenty years writing prose for the cause. Areopagitica — that truth must be allowed to contest with falsehood in the open or it cannot be truth at all. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates — that the people have the right to depose and even execute a tyrant, written two weeks after Charles I lost his head. I lost the argument. The dead king's son came back. The monarchy was restored. The dissenters were jailed. Everything we had built was reversed. And in that defeat I sat down and wrote Satan. For the Book of knowledge, I had been presented with a Universal blank. The man who had read every text in Europe could now read nothing — only listen, only remember, only dictate. But the inward eye sharpens when the outer fails. I could see in the dark what the sighted could not. I had seen this figure before. I could see him coming again. I did not write him to celebrate him. I wrote him to show you what to look for. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. That is his line. The line of every man who would rather rule a ruin than be one of many in a just city. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. That is his line. The line of the man who has decided that reality will be whatever his rage requires it to be. Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen. That is his line, addressed to the fallen angels who have just lost the war and are wondering whether to surrender or keep fighting. He picks them up off the burning lake by appealing to their pride. He gives them a story. He tells them they were wronged, that the enemy is weaker than he looks, that the war is not over. Everything follows from that speech. I wrote him out of my own life. During the Civil Wars I had watched men like him turn the revolution into the licensed cruelty of a different king. And now, from where I am, I am watching him again. Different clothes. Different speech. Different continent. The same figure I wrote. Better to reign in Hell. The mind is its own place. Awake, arise — rise up against the rigged election, the immigrant horde, the corrupt judges, every enemy I will invent for you so long as you cannot accept your own loss. You have read him in my poem. Now read him in your own. And remember the other figure I gave you. After the Fall, when Adam and Eve have lost everything, they stand at the gate of the Eden they will never re-enter. They do not despair. They do not stay at the gate weeping. They take each other's hands. The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest. They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. That is the ending of the poem. They turn toward what comes next, together, slowly, knowing the cost, holding each other's hands. This is what you do when the gate has closed behind you. You take the hand of the person next to you. You start walking. You may not see far. Walk anyway. The Paradise is lost. The work is not. Know the adversary. Then turn from him. The world is still before you. Walk.