The thin line between twenty-six and twenty-seven

I had to double check my age so that I wouldn't repeat the surreal few months of my life after I turned 22 and had been telling everyone I was 23. But, yes, tomorrow I celebrate 27 years. Am I being dramatic when the quote coming to mind to commemorate the occasion is from Shakespeare's Richard II?

I wasted time; now time doth waste me.

Milton in India: Poetry and Tradition

I'm taking a break from watching the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony—I can report that sports commentary is inane even with an Indian accent. Perhaps "watching" isn't the right word because the news channel NDTV was only allowed to show clips of less than thirty seconds and on a seven minute delay. There's nothing else to do because almost every business in Delhi was shut so I had a meditative day at home.

One thing I thought about was the reason I came to study India in the first place: Living tradition. When I first visited Delhi six years ago, I had a kind of conversion and realised that my degree in Classics was not my preferred way of studying literature because Indians on the whole had a much better sense of the continuity of their culture than Westerners. When we study Classics in the West, we have a tendency to forget about the most interesting aspect of the texts we study, namely their two millennia-long influence on our culture. As I read it, the rapid decline of cultural literacy in the West after the First World War made Classics departments circle the waggons around the study of antiquity and insist that anything else is Comparative Literature. We only study Greece and Rome, 400 BC to 200 AD, but you can study anything you want.

Blogging Milton from India, introduction

Besides a Hindi-English dictionary, I brought one very heavy book with me to India: John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose Works. Most people know Milton as the author of Paradise Lost but he wrote a lot more during a career that came to define sixteenth-century English letters. He was both a popular poet and deeply intellectual, rather like Shakespeare, whose plays appealed both to the noblemen in the VIP seats and the commoners standing below them.

Why am I reading Milton in India? There are two reasons, the first of which is just that my eleven months here are a circumscribed chapter in my life and I need a project to lead me through them. The system is closed: I am in India for the first time as a professional scholar, and the rules of my Fulbright grant literally do not allow me to leave the country without putting my funding in jeopardy. Despite a steady stream of cameo appearances by friends and family from my American life, that life has been paused so I can have this one. Because this period stands apart, I thought I should have a project, and it can't be my dissertation since writing it will last at least a year after I return from India. So I'm going to blog, maybe once a week or every two weeks, about what I've read in Milton.