Wild Work

In the moments just after she has eaten a forbidden apple, the Eve of Paradise Lost contemplates what will happen if the death that was threatened as punishment actually—or eventually—"ensue[s]." "Then I shall be no more," she thinks, "And Adam wedded to another Eve, / Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct." This image of another woman is too much to stand, and moments later she approaches Adam with her secret and her fruit, "resolve[d]" to endure "with him all deaths" (9.827–32). Adam in turn also forms a "resolution … to Die," so painful is the thought of life without the "sweet Converse and Love" of one "so dearly joyn'd" to him, even if he could expect God to "create another Eve" (9.907–11).

The fact that both immediately assume "another Eve" is unsurprising—the future of humanity as Milton understood it depends on that kind of coupling—but the triangulations they imagine are not quite the same. Confronted with the possibility of losing Eve, Adam envisions carrying on with a second wife in a way that seems fraught with fear of loneliness, a recurrence of the solitariness and dis-ease that characterized his earliest moments in the garden. For Eve, it is replacement that dominates the fantasy, fear that Adam will not mourn her loss because his attention will be captivated elsewhere. It's the thought of Eve's demise that occasions this difference, of course, in those few suspended moments before Adam too decides to eat, and so also to die. And it's a short path from this moment of epic tension—the instant in which the fate of human history will be sealed—to me awake in the wee hours of a night, wondering what would happen if I stormed a certain hair salon in a neighboring town and demanded the owner keep her damned cheating hands off my husband.

I Facebook-stalked them both for a while, the way you do, as if catching them at it after the fact would vindicate, validate, register somehow. What would she do? I asked him, of the hair-salon-sortie. Would she feel regret? No, he said; she'd be angry. (We imagine that others are thinking about us, but honestly, they rarely are.) What would it matter anyway? I couldn't make myself drive into that town. The last time we were there together, when the lawyer finalized our separation agreement and my husband was barely recovered from having his gall bladder out, I wept helplessly into the steering wheel of my car while he crouched in the open driver's side door, sweating and holding my hand.

From a hospital bed he had told me he was in love with us both. I'd forgotten that until just the other day, reading back through four years of texts with my sister, to a message I'd sent her on the fourth day after I discovered it all. He loved his other Eve, he'd said, but he wanted his life with me.

I extinct.

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Milton fiercely believed that choice is inherent in the human condition of free will. "Reason also is choice," says God in Paradise Lost (3.108), sounding like his author, who believed angels and humans alike to be "authors to themselves in all" (122). Areopagitica, Milton's spirited argument against the licensing of books, defends a kind of greedy reading as the necessary foundation of an active and engaged citizenry: only by having the freedom to encounter both "good" and "bad" ideas through books do we cultivate the intellectual discernment that will foster our search for truth—which is itself not a uniform entity but rather a whole made up of a multitude of differing parts. Liberty of conscience is synonymous with being able to make our own decisions, the author declares; censorship infantilizes us, and human rationality, in its best incarnation, guarantees critical thinking. Milton was no fan of what he calls "glutton friars," and reserved his worst condemnations for church officials who hoard knowledge by suppressing the publication of books and who presume to impose...