Milton

I've been yammering that I'm gonna take the Yale Paradise Lost class, but of course I've been too lazy thus far. But in sticking my toes back in the water I did read the Areopagitica lecture, on which I happened to have read a few months ago anyways. I must say, it's nice to see a professor from Yale point out a particular passage that I had highlighted in my Norton Anthology 15 years before while at a pretend college:

A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.

I also liked “he that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian”, but this professor never brings it up. Ah well. Am I smarter than him? Probably. But who knows.

Anyway, now that we're finished Areopagitica, I'm ready for Paradise Lost. Yikes.