Paradise Re-Read

Part 2

 David first arrived in my mind as a sort of sad version of myself (or, as David would insist on describing himself, not depressive but “melancholic”).  He was a dad.  A man whose marriage had gone off the rails and didn’t have the emotional strength, simply didn’t know how to put it right.  I had, in The Demonologist’s early days, only this dim outline of a character.  And one other thing.  I had the taking away of David’s daughter – his world – by a demon.

Nobody around him would believe him if he revealed that’s what he suspected, and for good reason:  his daughter was officially deemed a suicide by authorities.  Grief is a powerful hallucinogen, and David’s pain – his guilt for not doing enough – warps his perspective enough to let the irrational find a way in.  That’s the outside world’s view of his suffering, in any case.  But David’s view is quite a different thing, something doubly upsetting for him because even he can see how desperate, how dismissible it is.  I saw a novel about mourning that opened the door to the impossible, a desire long felt by those who have lost someone close:  to return the beloved dead to the world of the living.  The kind of desire that leaves a space for the magical, the mythic, the demonic.

So where does re-reading Paradise Lost come into things?  Not via demons, interestingly enough, but a job.  David needed one (jobs are one of the ways we flesh out and understand a character, what they “do” being sometimes a key to who they “are”).  Patent lawyer?  Dental surgeon?  Yoga instructor?  Nothing matched up to the necessary solitude of David’s inner character.  I saw him as someone who interacted with the world on a daily basis, but who could nevertheless be hiding in plain sight, emotionally speaking.  Someone like a writer but not a writer.  A bookworm.  A professor of literature.

Yes, that was it.  A man who lived vicariously through fictions, who could identify but find it difficult to bridge the gap between the conceptual and the real.  It was when I started to wonder what David taught, day in and day out, that I thought of Milton.  Or, more precisely, I thought of Milton’s most famous character, his Satan.  Similarly isolated, similarly trapped within his own diseased consciousness, similarly disembodied (“The mind is its own place,” as the famous quotation puts it).

So David Ullman would be a professor of literature, specializing in Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Great!  Now what?  Now I had to re-read Paradise Lost, that’s what.

Maybe it was because I was more mature, or maybe it was because the world around me wasn’t quite as loud in its siren songs of temptation, but Milton’s masterpiece was a different ball game the second time around.  It was still hard going for stretches, and still – dare I say it? – a smidge too long (as Samuel Johnson pointed out, “None ever wished it longer”).  But its dark star burned all the brighter now.  Satan’s thwarted ambitions, his doomed rebellions against an often arbitrary and cold authority, his sufferings as the neglected child among a family of obedient overachievers, and most of all, the terrible loneliness he tried to bluff his way around but that nevertheless creeped into even his most defiant speeches – I understood Milton’s devil in human terms that perhaps it took admittance through the gates of early middle-age to appreciate.  Overnight, Paradise Lost graduated from a mere detail of character to a part of The Demonologist’s puzzle.  In a way, as you’ll see when you read the book, it is the novel’s puzzle.

One poem, two readings.  The second considerably more constructive than the first.  But if it weren’t for the solitary takeaway from the first time through – the lonely villain, at once sympathetic and terrifying – I wouldn’t have ventured a return journey.  I’m not sure if there will be a third reading, but you never know.  I’ll be a different man twenty years from now.  In a way, I’m probably already different from who I was when I started writing The Demonologist.  I hope your reading of it proves – however sublty – to be equally mind-altering.