All Feavorous Kinds

Aside from that one time infant Miltonista's intenstines decided to digest themselves (or something like that--I've never quite gathered what happened with any clarity, but the scar remains), and from that one time college sophomore Miltonista was hospitalized for four days after contracting pneumonia as a camp counselor, I've never had anything like a near-death experience. But it doesn't take much to trigger my moribund instinct. Several years ago, I was bitten by a squirrel (probably the lesser of the two squirrel stories in my life). I was relieved when the doctors told me I didn't need a rabies shot, but for the next week or so, I thought about what it'd be like if I were the second person in the U.S. to contract rabies from a squirrel bite. (It didn't help that I vividly remembered having watched a 20/20 segment about rabies as a child. Once you start exhibiting symptoms, you're doomed.)

Recently, I've been holed up inside, suffering from nothing more exotic or exciting than the common cold. But now that I'm starting to perk up, I can muster up some resentment at having wasted my time and at having been more than a little bit uncomfortable for the last several days. My thoughts wandered to Adam's first vision of illness in Book 11:

Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeard, sad, noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas'd, all maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs,
Dæmoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie
And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie
Marasmus and wide-wasting Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma's, and Joint-racking Rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair
Tended the sick busiest from Couch to Couch;
And over them triumphant Death his Dart
Shook, but delaid to strike, though oft invokt
With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope.

When I was teaching my Milton course last semester, I was startled by these lines--I had never noticed before how the gross bodily nature of the descriptions churn with a vitality that might even exceed some of the descriptions of Hell but, by the same token, come close to being too laughably grotesque. I suppose I noticed these lines because I had had a bit of an accident over the summer--nothing, ultimately, that was too catastrophic, but was scary at the time and had put me in one of my moribund funks. I've learned that incidents like that expand my capacity for empathy, occasionally to absurd levels. And these lines become, for Adam, an occasion for empathy:

Sight so deform what heart of Rock could long
Drie-ey'd behold? Adam could not, but wept,
Though not of Woman born; compassion quell'd
His best of Man, and gave him up to tears.

These strike me as curious lines; they tow a kind of very familiar weeping-as-effeminate-weakness topos while, at least to my ear, creating the undeniable impression that this weeping is gracious and wholesome. I'd like to think that this ambivalence is at least a partial reversion of the pat formula that precedes this scene: "What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve / Shall bring on men." A little later, Michael tows the party line again when he declares that gross illness befalls those who "serve ungovern'd appetite . . . a brutish vice, / Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve."

I actually think I'd like the world better if diseases were handed out in contrapasso fashion, that my cold was produced by some mildly unruly bacchanalia. Too bad shit don't work that way.