I have taught Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, for decades, but never has it seemed so immediate. Milton’s version of the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve is about the larger conflict between good and evil. This semester, I find myself teaching it differently, seeing it differently and talking about it differently, so that my students would feel it related to their lives as well as our shared and ever increasing anxiety.

Like the Bible, literary texts, especially rich ones, are not stable things with fixed meanings. They change depending on the circumstances and the period in which we read them.  And so is the case with Milton’s poem about the conflict between good and evil.

It’s easy to find in the world forces for “good” and forces we consider “evil.” We tend to think in binaries. In our politically and culturally polarized time in America, we might demonize people “on the other side.” This is most evident within the cable news channels, which remind us daily how divisions have only gotten deeper.  Many, especially those on the left, believe democracy is under threat in America, that it might not take much to turn it into an authoritarian nation and I agree with that point of view. On the other hand, the right demonizes liberalism. Texas is not the only state that wants to control what is taught in schools, elementary through college, and punish those who veer from a dictated curriculum. The teaching of America’s history is endangered. Books are being censored, even Maus, the graphic novel about the holocaust. The First amendment separating church and state and enshrining freedom of speech and the press is being violated. But now there is even more to worry about: WAR!

 Russia has invaded Ukraine and though most of the world supports the fight for its sovereignty, we worry that this might become not just a conflict between East and West, but a world war, with an aggressive Putin who warns us of his nuclear capabilities. Clearly this is the last thing we need on top of a pandemic!

Just as the invasion of Ukraine was beginning on February 24th, my Milton class at Barnard started Paradise Lost. Suddenly, it seemed necessary to link it to our present situation and not ignore what was happening. After all, I’d titled my course “Milton Then and Now.” Milton’s poem provided a way for I and my students to face, contemplate and discuss our concerns within a safe environment. I told my students how this seventeenth-century poem had suddenly taken on a new meaning for me and that I wanted to share it.

Milton announces in his opening lines that he intends to “justify the ways of God to man”—admitting that perhaps they need to be justified because if God is omnipotent then why did he let Adam and Eve fall when he knew the terrible things that would result? Paradise Lost is not just about the biblical couple, but about “us,” about our lives, how wars go on continuously and peace is elusive.

It has never hit me so hard that Milton’s poem actually presents conflict as the beginning of our history, starting with Satan’s war against God, which precipitates human history, maybe even precedes the creation of the earth and humans. War, indeed, frames Milton’s epic, dominating the first two books, which are Satan’s, and the last two, where the angel Michael tells Adam what the rest of human history will be. Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden into a world that we, and they, learn will be characterized by war, with paradise only to be found within. (Good luck to that when you are living in a state of heightened anxiety!)

For Milton, war is the battle between “good” and “evil,” which seems to reduce the complexity and messiness of life. We don’t all agree on what is good. And as Milton wrote in Areopagitica speaking against censorship, good and evil are often intertwined. But then again, not always.  

Paradise Lost represents “evil” as the forces of death and destruction. But Milton’s perpetrator of evil —Satan— rationalizes his war against God as liberation. Adam and Eve are collateral damage.

Isn’t this what we are witnessing with Vladimir Putin bizarrely justifying his invasion as an attempt to liberate Ukraine (whose president is Jewish) from “neo-Nazis?” Three million people (mostly women and over one million children) are now refugees having fled their country, and the number is growing, though “humanitarian corridors” have been blocked. Ukrainians are fighting, not only for their land and sovereignty, but for their very lives. So many desperate people are desperately trying to find a way out as Russian forces bomb civilian targets, residential areas and surround cities while cutting off food, water, medicine—everything needed to sustain life. On March 16th we learned they killed ten people waiting in a bread line. 

I cannot get these daily reports and images out of my mind as I teach Paradise Lost.

We took our time reading Books 1 and 2 of the epic where Milton tells us that long before the fall of man, war erupted in heaven, when Satan and his cohort rebelled against what he called the tyranny of God, fighting in the name of (a false) liberty, a cover for his desire to rule or be God himself. When I said that Paradise Lost suggests that war and destruction will exist until the end of time—hardly a comforting thought, even if true—my students looked grim. They were about to go off on their spring break. I wondered, should we really be reading this now?

Certain lines in Milton’s have a new immediacy:

Satan in his first speech, vowing “To wage by force or guile eternal War / Irreconcilable to our grand Foe” (God, who is the Creator, the giver of life). Or in his second speech, declaring

            To do aught good never will be our task,

            But ever to do ill our sole delight,

            ….If then his Providence

            Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,

            Our labor must be to pervert that end,

            And out of good still to find means of evil.        

Next week, when my students return and we read Book 4, we will watch Satan invade Eden, where Adam and Eve innocently dwell. Their “bower” (the place of sleep and love-making) is the holy center of paradise, sacred and supposedly inviolable. But nothing is safe, nothing protected, even before the Fall. Can Milton not imagine such a thing? Satan easily leaps over the boundaries of Eden. God doesn’t stop him, having announced in Book 3 that he’s bound by a law he created that gives free will to all his creatures. In his speeches, God justifies his non-interference policy. Once in Eden, Satan enters the bower, infusing an evil dream into the beautiful and pure Eve while she sleeps (This makes me think of the shelling of homes in Ukrainian cities at night). Intending to ruin all of God’s creation, Satan, the embodiment of evil, brings with him death.

Satan attacks the innocent. The Hebrew Bible tells us Amalek came from behind and attacked the Israelites as they fled from Egypt, killing the unprotected women, children and elderly at the rear. Satan and Amalek attack the most vulnerable. Putin has bombed the Maternity and Children’s hospital, a psychiatric clinic and numerous other health facilities. If this isn’t evil, I don’t know what is. 

Historically, war has been a constant experience for humans throughout the ages, but the years following the Vietnam War, not nearly as much by comparison (yet still, we can’t discount Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc.). Putin’s attack on Ukraine shatters that illusion and the world cannot look away.

After class, a student emailed thanking me for the lesson, saying I was the only professor she had who spoke about what was going on in the world. But the world’s catastrophe, like the pandemic, has changed how I teach and made me bolder, at least in the classroom. I struggle with anxiety, but maybe it’s a gift if I can put it to good use. Empathizing with my students (they are the future), I work hard to give them strength and hope, even as we confront hard truths together. Maybe in that way I also give myself hope.

This great poem by Milton—a blind but visionary wordsmith—casts light on our experience. Maybe (if I teach it right) Paradise Lost can send us out into the world like Adam and Eve at the end of the epic, strong enough to face the future, using our free will to try to make a difference, to make the world a better place and dedicate ourselves to revere life. 

Previously, I wrote about feeling in a funk, but I think the fog of funk is lifting for me, even though between then and now I caught Covid. I wasn’t terribly sick, but I had to go to bed for long hours and sleep. And after a couple of days I noticed I was sleeping more peacefully. No longer was I curled up in a fetal position, hugging myself tightly.  Covid had made me relax?  Is this a joke?

I started having random thoughts about humor. The recent death of Meat Loaf triggered it!  That in itself is comic. I posted on Facebook:  “Meat Loaf is dead!”  After a couple of friends  laughed, thinking I was referring to my own cooking, I realized how it sounded.  The more I thought about Meat Loaf, I started smiling.  Meat Loaf (the singer) had always cracked me up when I saw pictures of him, or watched videos!  At three hundred pounds, and with a huge voice, he was large in every sense and he flaunted it proudly. Here was this “ugly” lover on stage, sweating, long dark slightly greasy hair, dressed in a frilly white shirt and black jacket that said “MEAT,” singing songs of desire and young love in overwrought emotional performances that could bring tears to your eyes. The comic aspect at odds with the heartbreaking sincerity of the words and emotion.  So, I was sad when I read he died (gone was the most amazing, never-to-be-heard again voice; and gone was a time from my younger days), and yet the announcement “Meat Loaf has died” just sounded funny.  The comic aspect deepened and darkened as we learned he died of Covid after being a vocal anti-vaxxer.  The perfect example of the dark humor of irony.

I continued thinking how humor is a necessary leavening for the heaviness of life, a bit of light in times of darkness.  

I started teaching again on Zoom for the first two weeks of this spring semester.  I am teaching serious stuff—nothing comic.  John Milton, the Enlightenment, with Spinoza and Newton, and Locke.  But when I looked briefly at my Zoom recordings of the classes, I was struck by how often I laughed, or said something funny (amusing myself, if not my students). and I realized not only that teaching/conversing with my students makes me happy, but also I sometimes can’t help but say something unserious because humor feels necessary, seriously necessary.

But these days it is easy to say something ironically or with a sense of fun that someone is likely to mistake, or call out as inappropriate or even worse, offensive.  Be careful what you joke about. We have to check ourselves, constantly, to make sure we don’t say the “wrong” thing.  It is true that words and the things we say can be used to inflict hurt, be hateful, racist, or to demean others of their humanity.  But just as we are continually monitoring and testing ourselves for Covid, so too I feel we are becoming hyper-vigilant about our language, words, and even sentences.  It is necessary and at times just, but isn’t it also exhausting?  I know some of my readers will even be afraid to “like” what I write, to be public about that (it happened once before with a blog), and I think that‘s a scary state of affairs.  

Humor is transgressive, a point I will return to, and thus dangerous in our increasingly polarized and violent America. We need change and reform to transform our society, to make it more just.  Zeal and passion fuel the urge to effect change, but it also fuels the conservative fear of change, desperate efforts to return to a supposedly better past. I wonder if zeal is inevitably at odds with humor.

Freud taught that humor often conceals anger and aggression, which is nevertheless still there, simmering below the surface. Jerry Seinfeld has said “all humor starts with anger,” which I think is an exaggeration, for there are varieties of humor. 

The comedian Bob Saget, who unexpectedly died in his sleep in a hotel room on January 9, 2022, was beloved by many, and brought lightness and humor to our lives. He was tender and kind, even though he had a filthy mouth. As with everything, there’s a spectrum, from light to dark humor, from empathetically kind and gentle to hostile, nasty and intentionally hurtful. There’s “gallows humor,” purposely grim during desperate situations, historically used by people condemned to die.  Humor can be something to protect you, a weapon to wound, or a healing balm. It can be something to raise the spirit. Laughter can indeed be good medicine, and something to bring people together, rather than divide, though I suppose we always risk alienating someone. And in our time of pandemic instability and grim seriousness, we need that medicine.

Humor is a way to cope with the sadnesses and tragedies of life. Think how many famous comic writers and comedians actually have struggled with depression: Sarah Silverman, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor.  Robin Williams took his own life after being diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia. Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Chris Farley all died young of drug overdoses.  Most depressed comedians, however, survive, and it’s their humor that is a life-giving drug, a self-generated medicine that helps them survive and thrive, while helping and giving pleasure to others. Wit and humor by the talented Mel Brooks, for example, is like a gift, which can be a service and a kindness to others. 

But humor is trasngressive, subversive, and thus feared and hated by ideologues. In Nazi Germany, Goebels called political jokes “the remnant of liberalism.” Anti-Nazi humor was considered a crime against Hitler, the state, and the Nazi government, punishable by death! As the linguist John McWhorter tweeted on January 28, 2022, “Humor is the first thing to go under the rule of ideologues.” So, I worry about our situation now.

We need humor, perhaps more than ever. Bessel Van der Kolk’s 2016 book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, continues to be in the top ten on the NY Times bestsellers list. Anxiety and depression are at record levels among our young people, resulting in an increase in suicide, especially young men. With this in mind, I do everything I can to keep my students happy, to give them a sense of purpose and hope. The New York Times ran an article on Feb. 18, with the headline “Yale Professor of Happiness [who teaches the popular course “Psychology and the Good Life] Says Anxiety is Destroying her Students.” In the interview, she announced she’s taking leave due to burnout. (Dark comedy here? The course on happiness isn’t working? And has exhausted her?)

My wise psychiatrist friend, who has specialized in childhood trauma, tells me of all the adaptive, coping mechanisms for trauma, humor, especially witty humor (not bathroom humor), is the highest form. I’ve been thinking about that. The brain must somehow transform, transmute the trauma—and yes, there may be anger and aggression, but somehow the material becomes changed and the person assumes a power over it, at least momentarily, through the transformative power of language. It is creative, maybe not unlike the opening of Genesis where God creates the world through language. “Let there be light.”

Dedicated to the memory of my husband, Tony, the wittiest person I have ever known.