Pearl Harbor and Milton

Today is Pearl Harbor Day.

I think that because the ranks of the Greatest Generation who lived through that time are growing thinner each day, it’s important for those of us in later generations to remember the sacrifice made by those more than 2400 Americans who lost their lives on December 7, 1941.

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I haven’t talked about the Great Conversation reading group I belong to in a while. Here’s a description of the group from the group’s web page at : http://www.greatconversation.org/

The Great Conversation is a reading group dedicated to reading the great works of Western civilization. The name and original inspiration of the group is Britannica Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer Adler. Adler believed the great books could be viewed as a dialog, a conversation. The goal of our group is to listen in on that conversation and even to begin to participate in it.
The goal is to read many of the original texts of these authors directly and unfiltered.
Anyone is free to join and read. Having a copy of the Britannica Great Books is not required, as these books are also available in other formats by other publishers, such as Penguin.

The readings for December are:
SHAKESPEARE: Macbeth
MILTON: Paradise Lost


Even though having a copy of the Britannica Great Books is not required, it would be very helpful. I still haven’t made it to the library to pick up a copy of the December readings, and there’s no guarantee that the copies will be available when I go to the library. So today I went downstairs to look in our own library to see if I might actually own these Great Books.

I inherited an incomplete set of the Harvard Classics from my parents. I knew that the Harvard Classics included works by both Milton and Shakespeare, so possibly I could already have the works in my possession. Well I scored a 50% success rate on that search. Macbeth was one of the Shakespeare plays but Paradise Lost was not one of the Milton selections.

Since I didn’t have Milton’s Paradise Lost yet, I took some time today to sit down and read some of Milton’s writings that were included in the Harvard Classic volumes. One of them was Areopagitica, A Speech, For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. In it Milton makes a plea for freedom of the press and freedom from censorship in printing. Here is a sample of his against the censorship and destruction of books:

… for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

And from his tractate On Education:

The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

I need to get to the library and pick up Paradise Lost.