Thereof One Must Be Silent

Tell it slant.

When I was a little boy, my mother explained to me that my grandma was coming all the way from America to visit us in London. I must have been tiny, because I didn’t know what a “grandmother” was. Mom said, “she’s a very nice old lady who wants to see you.” So of course when grandma walked in the door I sprang up gleefully to meet her shouting “grandma! Old lady! OLD!”

Some true things are better left unsaid. Being what they call a “wordcel,” straining always to carve out every thought in just the right language, I have taken a long time to learn this. An even harder thing, but truer still, is that some things can’t be said. They vanish at the edges of our speech.

All year I’ve been recording Milton’s Paradise Lost and posting it here book by book. This week I finally reached the main event, where Satan oozes into the mouth of the snake and comes to seduce Eve. Milton announces up front that he’s switching to the tragic mode; he proceeds to deliver a heartbreaking scene in which Eve persuades Adam to let her wander off alone for the day.

Adam is reluctant, but she wins him over. It’s like watching one of those horror movies: for the love of paradise, don’t go in the basement! But here’s something strange. I had to stop and re-record the exchange between Adam and Eve over and over. I just couldn’t figure out how to get the tones of their voices right. I couldn’t hear them.

I came to suspect that there is literally no correct way to read the passage aloud. The sound of those two lovers speaking is lost forever with the garden, at least on this Earth. Milton wrote, as well as any human could, a disagreement without a trace of unkindness or resentment. We can imagine, but we can’t possibly embody, that kind of innocence.

When Eve asks Adam how he could ever suspect her of falling—“Thoughts, which how found they harbour in thy breast / Adam, misthought of her to thee so dear?”—it’s hard not to detect at least the possibility of passive aggression. Adam responds: “Not diffident of thee do I dissuade / Thy absence from my sight, but to avoid / Th'attempt itself, intended by our Foe.” For him it’s utterly frank, a plain clarification. But we can hear the echo of the cringing husband, backtracking away from the anger of his hectoring wife.

Milton knows that what he has to tell, no ear has heard. When the angel Raphael explains to Adam how war broke out in heaven, he makes the caveat that what he says will be indirect, using the clash of flesh to reflect the pure communion of spirits. “What surmounts the reach / Of human sense, I shall delineate so, / By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms.” Some truths, as Emily Dickinson knew, can only be told slant.

Here, where we begin dying from the moment of our birth, every breaking dawn is already tinged with the coming nightfall. Unmingled bliss is one of the things we can only see out of the corners of our eyes. We have to approach it obliquely, by the sweet agony of infinite half degrees.

I’ve often thought that though there are many beautiful paintings of the resurrection, all the truly great ones are of the crucifixion. Death, we can picture. But the gospel accounts of death’s end are so uncanny, so ethereal and yet so weighty, it’s impossible to get them right in images. Then yesterday, as all this crossed my mind again, I ended up reading the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari’s assessment of Da Vinci’s Last Supper:

He gave to the heads of the apostles great majesty and beauty, but left that of Christ imperfect, not thinking it possible to give it that celestial divinity which is required for the representation of Christ.

The most beautiful expression of this idea in English is the King James translation of 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” But though its loveliness justifies it, the preposition “through” gives rather the wrong idea. It evokes the feeling of looking straight through a dusty window at something directly behind it, or even peering into a magic portal like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter.

But the word Paul uses is katoptron, which simply means a reflective surface, maybe polished stone or metal. You could use surfaces like that to see yourself in the ancient world, but the prefix “kata” plus the opt- root also suggests viewing something indirectly or from the side. It’s never occurred to me until now that maybe Paul is talking about seeing God around a corner, like a face you glimpse almost bashfully at an angle through a mirror, over your shoulder.

It would certainly make sense of Milton, and Vasari, and all those things we can only grope for even when we talk about them openly. Love, for instance: no one has ever found the words to pierce to the heart of the matter. Who can say what I meant to say all those years ago, when grandma walked through that door? What lover really feels satisfied with the rude tools we use for this most sacred business? Don’t we have to say it again and again, in a million different ways? “I love you”: no eye has yet looked head on at the fullness behind those words. But one day we will see face to face.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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