At the end of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, after we’ve spent time with Adam and Eve in the wondrous space of the Garden of Eden; after Eve has been tempted to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge by Satan; after Adam has chosen—willingly and knowingly, and with an aching tenderness toward his spouse—to follow her in that act; after we’ve witnessed what I think is surely the most painful scene from a marriage ever written, in which Adam, now refusing to own any part of the act that has separated them from God, lashes out at Eve with a venomous cruelty, bestowing on her the entire burden of the Fall; after Eve, in begging for mercy from Adam not only finds a way to melt his flash-frozen heart, but also models the spirit and act of repentance that will heal their estrangement from God; after the stunning penitential poetry that results in their forgiveness . . . after all of this, God sends his emissary, heaven’s great historian, the Archangel Michael, to remove them from the Garden. First, though, Michael will take Adam to the top of a high hill and hit “Play Slideshow From Beginning” on an epic PowerPoint that will “show thee what shall come in future days” (XI 357).
Okay, let’s just pause for a moment and acknowledge the fact that yes, I am talking about John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost. I am doing so for a couple of reasons. The first one being that some of you, some of you who know me pretty well, when you saw that I was going to be the Commencement Speaker for HCOL, turned to the person sitting next to you and said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks she talks about Paradise Lost.” I never let my people down.
And secondly--and this is what those gamblers know about me--I do think pretty much everything we need to know—about ourselves, about each other, about the “messy domain of human interaction” (and yes, to those of you who took HCOL 085, I am quoting Jerome Bruner)---we can find in an encounter with Paradise Lost. And that is true regardless of how we feel about God or Satan, or Archangels with PowerPoint skills. Paradise Lost, though it is a nominally religious poem, has more to tell us about tyranny, and liberty, and love, and the bonds of obligation—and a whole lot of other stuff—than anything I have ever read. More than a few non-believing students I’ve taught in my Milton classes over the years have come to agree with that. For what is now most of my life, Milton has taught me, and I in turn have tried to teach my students, that if I take the risk of reading this poem, if I work hard to understand it, committing at the same time to be humbled by what I can’t understand, or can’t understand yet, if I surrender to the immense possibilities of what it has to teach us, I will be a different—a better and maybe even wiser—person than I would have been without it. Milton himself wasn’t very humble, and maybe that’s exactly why he could write a poem like Paradise Lost, but I am grateful for the way he humbles me. And I am very grateful for this poem.
But back to Michael’s PowerPoint.
Michael takes Adam all the way through the Bible—it’s a long slide show. Or it could have been a long slide show except that at a certain point, it’s all a little too much for Adam—one critic says that he “collapses under the ordeal of being consoled”--, and Michael needs to turn off the projector and just narrate the rest of the story. That Adam is overcome gives you a sense of Adam as a listener, and really as a person. He lives and loves intemperately, with his whole mind and body; he is curious and impulsive; he loves to learn, but he suffers from an utter lack of skepticism. He’s enthusiastic, Adam is, taking things at face value and running with them. (Which is exactly why Satan doesn’t choose to tempt Adam—but that’s another story.)
Adam’s reactions to Michael’s show and tell perfectly showcase that enthusiasm. Slide 1 depicts the murder of one of Adam’s sons, Abel, by the other, Cain. “O miserable mankind, to what fall/Degraded, to what wretched state reserved!” wails Adam, ready to close the book on life itself. Like a really patient teacher, Michael sympathizes with Adam’s impulse but then gently corrects his interpretation saying “Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st/Live well.” And then he says: “And now prepare thee for another sight.”
That sight is one of pleasure—music, lovely women, dancing—“songs, garlands, flow’rs/And charming symphonies.” To which Adam, eagerly jumping to another conclusion, exclaims “Here nature seems fulfilled in all her ends.” Michael is a little swifter to correct this time, admonishes, “Judge not what is best/By pleasure.” And then again, “But now prepare thee for another scene.”
We are still several slides from Noah.
And so it goes, for several hundred lines: Michael relating the stories of the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament; Adam reacting uncritically to the images and then to the narrative; Michael adjusting the interpretation and repeating each time the equivalent of: “hang on hang on, let me finish.” When he finally does finish and pauses, as Milton says, “As at the world’s great period,” Adam finally seems to get it right:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!
Michael has patiently succeeded in leading Adam to hope. And he’s done thatby giving Adam what amounts to a long memory and teaching him how to use it. Without memory, without the accumulated stories that make up our past, the only option we have is, like Adam, to look at each event of our lives as a one-off that immediately colors the whole. We succeed at something or a wonderful thing happens, and all of life is good; we fail at something, or something terrible happens, and our entire life is a miserable failure. Both of those responses ignore the larger narrative context of our lives, what we have learned, or should have learned, from the accrued stories that have come before. And in so doing, both of those responses—even the one that feels good--eliminate the possibility of hope.
Because HOPE, as Milton knew, and as Michael is trying to teach Adam, is, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, like the weather, not like checkers. You have to go to the long view for hope. God does not abandon Adam and Eve as he did Satan, much earlier in Paradise Lost, but they are about to take up habitation in a new place—let’s call it Vermont—where the weather is not always going to be good. In fact, sometimes it’s going to be very bad. To get through some of the long Vermont winters, they will need the consoling stories that remind them that one cold winter does not an ice age make. That after winter always comes spring.
For us, that consolation comes from the stories of our past, from memory, from our history of survival. The problem is that Adam and Eve don’t yet have a past that can console. At this point, they really just have one story, and they’re still sort of right in the middle of it. So God, through Michael, gives them a vision of the future that can serve as a kind of past. A proleptic memory that leads to hope.
I’ve reached the pivot point in this address, the place where I now need to make all of this relevant to you. And you know, initially I thought that I would draw the analogy between your time at UVM these last four years, and Adam and Eve’s time in the garden before the fall. But that had all kinds of things wrong with it. First of all, it would put Commencement in the place of the Fall—and that would cast your education—represented by all of us in these robes—as Satan. And while I know at times that’s probably exactly what you’ve thought of us, I just didn’t want to go there. But what really disqualified the analogy was the fact that it required you to have been innocent until today. Even the willing suspension of disbelief can’t stretch that far.
Instead, I decided to tell you about two Honors theses I was privileged to be involved in this spring that will make my point better than anything I could have made up.
The first was a memoir, a collection of poems and creative nonfiction that delved into issues of identity. The beautifully written pieces focused on family and other relationships, with both people and ideas. Every once in a while, the fact that the writer identifies as queer would surface in the writing, but rarely, if ever, as an issue, or at least no more of an issue than the many other features that mark that person’s identity. And it certainly was not an “issue”—contested or otherwise--to anyone in the room for the defense. It didn’t raise any eyebrows, it didn’t cause any discomfort. It didn’t deflect at all from the excellent conversation we all had about the craft of writing. It was normal.
The other thesis, by a student who is—was!—a History major, looked at the cultural experiences of gay men in two New England communities—Hartford, CT and Burlington—our Burlington-- from 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots in NYC (the real
beginning of the gay rights movement), to 1981, the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Among the many things of note that I learned both reading the thesis and in the defense, were these two things: first, in the 1970’s, the Department of Psychiatry in the UVM Medical School had a national reputation for its work on electroshock conversion therapy; and secondly, Bernie or no Bernie, in the 1970’s the word “progressive” would not have been associated with Vermont politics.
If I had been a gay male in Burlington in 1969; if, following Stonewall, I hoped and expected that next week, or next month, or, okay, next year, I would able to marry my male partner-- my hope would have died in those conversion therapy rooms in the hospital. Barring the visitation of an angel to show me what two Honors students would be doing with their theses at UVM in 2017, though, if I’d looked to what had happened in this country regarding civil rights for African Americans over the previous few decades, I might have found reason to be hopeful.
It’s a complicated world that you’re heading out into. It holds tremendous possibilities for you all, and we send you out with great expectations. But you and I both know that there will also be times when hope feels like it’s in short supply. Take the long view. Summon your memories, your histories—personal and collective, private and public, domestic and international—run the slide show in your heads, and, armed with the evidence that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, be patient. Be determined, but be patient. The past is chock full of reasons to be hopeful about the future.
“The world was all before them,” says Milton in the quietly but profoundly hopeful lines that conclude Paradise Lost. And so it is for you. Thank you for allowing us to spend the last four years in your presence. You may not have been entirely innocent, but the memory of who you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished gives us all hope.