Tracing Paradise: A Meditation on Milton, Chores, and a Private Life
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPAt some juncture of nearly every morning, I copy out a few lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. I type my day's dose on a small laptop computer perched on a foldout shelf in the study corner of my bedroom, a jumbly combination of the beautiful and the half-baked: the lovely, crammed inset bookcases built by my husband Tom and the temporary (for ten years or so) clamp-lamp lighting he hasn't gotten around to replacing; the elegant antique cherry writing-table his parents bought us when we had no furniture and the cheesy fake-Persian rug I got on sale at Reny's, a tiny department store with unpredictable merchandise, located in Dexter, fifteen miles down a frost-heaved road from our house in Harmony, Maine. Over my desk are tacked postcards of Caravaggio paintings, a grubby needlepoint eggplant I laboriously talked myself into finishing in elementary school, a picture ripped out of Mojo showing Mick Jagger in a frilly shirt reciting Shelley's Adonais at Brian Jones's funeral ("'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep / With phantoms an unprofitable strife"), a scrap of raw pine board with my name spelled out in nail holes (a birthday gift from my hammer-happy son James). It's a lovely place to work, and once two moose in a breeding frenzy burst out of the forest right below my window, which adds to the corner's aura of accomplishment.
But, before I can rendezvous with Milton, I have to talk myself into getting out of bed. On a usual winter morning that means forcing myself away from a warm husband into the pitch-dark of 5:30 a.m., down a flight of steep stairs from our attic bedroom, into a house that for some hours now has been rapidly chilling.
It's easy to be histrionic about the difficulties of getting out of bed, and a cold climate makes the melodrama even easier. In Norse myth, life began when the frost giant Ymir and his ice cow exploded from a pit trapped between a land of frozen fog and a land of roaring fire. In Maine this version of creation can, at certain seasons, seem perfectly plausible; and, if I'd been writing Paradise Lost, I might have imagined Hell as a barren fortress of wind and sleet. For there comes a time in every year when all work in the house takes second place to fire; and I am the unskilled fire-starter who is, on most mornings, responsible for kindling the spark.
If you live in a house with central heating, it's easy to believe that warmth [End Page 264] is an inalienable right, that humanity has reduced its epic struggle with the elements to an irritating spat with a draughty window or a damp sock. A hurricane or a tsunami may hurl us temporarily back into Milton's world; but like all animals we live in the present tense. What happens in front of our eyes seems truer than anything else.
In front of me every morning is a black iron maw that must be fed paper and kindling and split maple. And this is just the end of the story; there's the Little Red Hen litany that has led me to the moment of lighting a match. Who will choose the trees to cut? Who will sharpen the chainsaw? Who will haul the logs into the dooryard? Who will split them into firewood? Who will stack them in the woodshed? Who will carry them into the house?
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
Like a string of beads or a game of cards, a chore has a history. One task follows the next, follows the next...
