Paradise Somethinged

One of my favorite teachers from undergrad was an English professor who taught a class on Milton. Even if I hadn’t liked Professor L and his class so much, I think he still would have been one of my most memorable professors. The semester after I took Professor L’s class he went on the lamb amidst varying and sensational rumors, and I think that now it would be fair to upgrade his status from “memorable” to “infamous”.

It was obvious that he was restless with being a professor. He definitely loved teaching, and was one of those people who had a gift for communication, but an increasingly massive set of administrative nonsense made it hard for him to breathe. One day Professor L made us laugh by telling us about an old friend of his, a bipolar but tenured history professor who used to throw rocks through the windows of the Liberal Arts Dean’s Office when he was annoyed with the university. He finished the story after our laughter had died down, by reminiscing about some of his old friend’s other quirks. Later he told us that the reason that particular professor no longer taught was due to an untimely and self-induced death, from a bullet to the head.

It was easy to see coincidences in the story of the history professor and in Professor L’s own life. Beyond Professor L’s disdain for the administration, one got small peeks into the reality that he was hindered by his own disease. Even before the semester when he failed to turn up for his classes people might have noticed, if they paid attention, that he was almost never without his plaid, innocuous looking coffee flask – even when it seemed unlikely that he’d be drinking coffee. And his students probably raised their eyebrows at the more-than-occasional cancelled class, given without real explanation.

One afternoon I saw Professor L. walking down the street near the university, carrying nothing but his plaid flask and a newspaper. He was wearing nondescript jeans that weren’t large enough to distract from his skinny legs and a striped, baggy t-shirt. The clothes looked as if he’d slept in them. His white hair, as always, was slicked back, and his goatee was scraggly. It occurred to me that if I didn’t know who he was, I might think he was homeless. He was – and still is, I’m sure – the type of person who’s casually described as a “character”, whose antics are recounted with amusement. But the antics were more than worth it if you got the chance to hear him teach.

I’d been a lover of English poetry for years when I took Professor L’s class, and had spent probably more time than can be considered healthy reading John Donne aloud to savor the rhythm of the words, or researching the compositions dates on Tennyson’s poems. But Professor L’s class opened the door of history through the amazing structural intricacies that Milton used to compose his works. Above all I realized that I could never truly appreciate Milton, nor could anyone else, that Milton was trapped by the peculiarities of time and circumstance. Or, maybe, that we were trapped. I can read English poetry with joy and “understand” it, even learn from it. And, now, I can delve deeper by examining the structure of the poetry and what that helps it to say. But I’ll never be able to read Lycidas and implicitly feel the urgency of a particular verse because of the fact that is has less syllables. I’ll never naturally understand that a verse is meant to impart strength because it has three lines instead of two.

There was a time when the Western world was ruled by theology and faith. Obviously, this had some setbacks, like bleeding people with leeches. But the horror of the superstition was almost matched by the beautiful interconnectedness of the imagined universe. Now we can analyze and scientifically explain, but the sense of connection is lost to society. Now we feel more disconnected than ever. I remember one class Professor L spoke about being disconnected as a society, and leaned forward to stare. “You think you really know anybody?” The room was silent, and the electricity of it made me shiver. The void between each person in the room felt like limitless space, dark and unpassable. And as much as I wanted to say yes, we can truly know each other, I understood what he meant. In the vastness of life we barely know ourselves, so knowing another person is like stumbling blindly around a huge, darkened building. The terror of being so vulnerable can be enough to stop your efforts, and even when you resolve to try you still have to fight the size and the darkness, with no guarantee that anyone will turn on the lights.

Milton himself knew something about darkness, and about faith. In about 1640, Milton felt ready to write the work of his life. But against the backdrop of political upheaval, Milton was asked by Cromwell to be an official pamphleteer for the Puritan government. Milton felt divided, and was aware that he couldn’t write his masterpiece and adequately support his political philosophy at the same time. He put poetry on hold and became a pamphleteer.

Writing of that kind was hard work. By 1651 the long hours by candelight had taken their toll, and Milton had become completely blind. Nine years later the monarchy was reinstated and Milton, now an enemy of the government, was arrested and eventually impoverished. While living off a friend’s charity in a small room, blind and poor, Milton took up his pen and began his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, the work that would come to define the modern view of Christian theology.

Professor L had the ability to make all of that real, to cross the void into Milton’s time and show his students the hidden corners of history and the unrecognized genius in Milton’s works. He recreated the world of interconnectedness, even though his reality was very different. Like Donne, he seemed to be straddling the divide between faith and rationalism, between isolation and understanding.

For awhile after Professor L stopped teaching, the university still had him classified as a member of the faculty. Now he seems to be erased from memory; no matter how many ways I tried to google his name, all I could find were old, brief documents that listed his name along with dozens of other UT professors. For all of the impact he made on the dozens of students who fought to take his class, he’s now so far away that even the internet can’t find him.

Sometimes isolation goes beyond having nothing to do on a Friday night. For some, it can be the crushing reality of being a single person, living in a particular place, during a time when the most people hope for in terms of connection is for someone to love them “for who they are”. For some isolation is the reality of human existence. I can empathize with feeling adrift in that vast space, but I can also say that I’ve had experiences that transcended the physical constructs that keep us isolated. Far from hard to reconcile, this is just the reality of being a spiritual being living in a physical world. I think the connections that seem to elusive are more tangible that we realize, and the fact that they’re hard to grasp is a reason to work hard, not a reason to despair. I hope that, no matter what Professor L is doing, he’s found a way through the sadness in his life. I hope he realizes that, no matter how trapped he may be just by virtue of who he is, there’s probably some student that he doesn’t even remember who’s looking him up on the internet, or flipping through old notes from class while cleaning out a closet, or looking up at the night sky and remembering Milton:

“When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall clime,

Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,

Attir'd with Stars, we shall for ever sit,

Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.”