Notes on Milton

Some notes I jotted down on "Paradise Lost (in italics):"

This reminds me of the Prometheus myth...

Satan a prototype of Camus's absurd hero as well as a metaphor for the human condition.

On line one:  "Of Mans First Disobedience..."

What happy life can exist in a state of unquestioning obedience? What happy life is possible without the consciousness of there being an alternative?

Lines 39-40:  "To set himself in Glory above his Peers,/He trusted to have equal'd the most High"

Struggle toward the heights...a life without struggle and without exertion of individual will is sterile.

"Him the Almighty Power/Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie/With hideous ruine and combustion down/To bottomless perdition." (45-47)

The casting out of heaven a wider metaphor for separation from unified and orderly meaning:  an estrangement by choice from the paternal, the rational, and the deterministic.

"But his doom
 Reserv'd him to more wrath:  for now the thought
 Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
 Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
 That witness'd huge affliction and dismay
 Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate;" (53-58)

From Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus:"

"Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods,  powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition:  it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn."

"What though the field be lost?
  All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
  And study of revenge, immortal hate,
  And courage never to submit or yield:
  And what is else not to be overcome?
  That Glory never shall his wrath or might
  Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
  With suppliant knee, and deifie his power,
  Who from the terrour of this Arm so late
  Doubted his Empire." (105-114)

From "The Myth of Sisyphus:"

"His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing."

People must scorn their gods, how could they not, viewing as they do the randomness and suffering in the world?

Satan is fully aware of his separateness, fully aware of the hopeless futility of any action at all, yet acts if for no other reason than spite. How like us.

"The mind is its own place, and in it self
  Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
  What matter where, if I be still the same,
  And what I should be, all but less then he
  Whom Thunder hat made greater? Here at least
  We shall be free..." (255-259)

From "The Myth of Sisyphus:"

"That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of these moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock."