Privilege of Being

(This post is a little late, sorry)

I think Milton’s contiguous  ideas are incredible, where cutting apart the concepts is in fact how to truly build them and create something in uniform, that sanctity is developed through divisions. I love it because it is human, because continuity is impossible to achieve in its pure shape, and we are all fallen people with flaws, with “brotherly dissimilitudes” and “moderate varieties.” The poem The Privilege of Being by Robert Hass draws upon this significance of human contiguity, and it is shown when the angels are jealous of Adam and Eve when they have sex. They aren’t jealous that humans aren’t at the spiritual level that they as angels are, they are jealous because humans, by not being continuous, are able to enjoy life on a much more interesting level, because there are more lines to be drawn, there are more boundaries to cross, there is more good and more evil to fall back and forth between. Thus, the good is better because the evil exists. Milton certainly goes more deeply into this, trying to avoid the duality, or if you will, the binary composition of good versus evil, which is too surficial for Milton’s taste. Milton finds evil to be the absence of God, not the antithetical good, but rather the absence. Thus, you aren’t a being if you are evil, and you aren’t of God, since God is being. On page 212, where he brings up the story of Psyche and the seeds, “that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder,” Milton creates an understanding of good and evil that I just fell in love with. Before there was evil, there was a way to know good. Obviously, Adam and Eve enjoyed goodness, before the apple and the fall. Yet, before evil, they had no choice to have good, to do good, to be good and be a being. There is no choice for good before the alternative of no good was brought into effect. Once good became a choice, humans became much more well-rounded, more able to be great, to be a virtuoso, or to not be a virtuoso. The point is, the angels are jealous of something that seems almost hypocritical, for I believe they are jealous of the choice between good and evil, the choice to be good, and the choice to have sex, and enjoy sex, to be in control and have such a mind where one can make decisions and thus appreciate life to an extent where angels cannot.