Blogadise Lost

So I've been reading Paradise Lost-- partly because I've been meaning to read it, but also because it's necessary for my Brit Lit class and, well, we know how that goes. Anyway, apparently Milton has a lot of interesting things to say about the sign and the representation of the thing vs. the thing itself, and deifying the representation over the thing (at least according to David Hawkes, who did the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition), which may or may not have some uncomfortable implications for my view of language. I'll have to read more of it, though, before I can pass judgement. Anyway, before I got in to all that, there was a quotation at the beginning of the introduction which caught my eye:

Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them as to be as active as that sole whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest effcacie and extraction of the living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

-Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

And it reminded me that, oh yeah, books aren't just assignments to be analysed and extracted and turned in for points in class. They are inspiration. They are why I'm on the path I'm on, wherever that's going. And that is living, that is important--and it's good to be reminded of that every once in a while, even by a kind of pompous, long dead guy. So thanks, books. You're awesome.

[Side note: While writing this post, I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes distracted by looking up the word "paradise" on the Oxford English Dictionary Online. And two things-- One, I'm letting my geek flag fly and celebrating because LSU resubscribed to the OED. It is maybe something a flagship university should have, I think. Two, the Old English word for Paradise, before we borrowed "Paradisium" from Latin, was "neorxnawanga". Which is way cooler. I'm bringing it back.]