This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of the English poet, John Milton. There’s a lot of hoopla going on to mark the occasion: new versions of his epic work, “Paradise Lost” as well as other books. New biographies and studies examining Milton’s lasting effect on culture, high and low. You can read all about it in the article, “Return to Paradise”, in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker.
I hadn’t thought much about Milton since I read “Paradise Lost” in Dr. Sawaya’s Honors English lit seminar as a freshman at Loyola Marymount University. Sitting in that classroom, I got my first taste of interpreting a serious piece of classic literature. Dr. Sawaya pulled the meaning from the text word by word for our relatively undeveloped undergraduate minds. He helped explain the layers of historic and religious references in the poem, as well as the ones Milton threw in about affairs of the day in early 17th century England, when he wrote his masterpiece.
We treated Sawaya like some kind of guru – He was so smart! He’d graduated from Harvard! He always wore a jacket and tie! (It was the 70s, nobody wore a tie). We thought ourselves lucky to be among the chosen few who got into the class.
And then he was gone. One year Milton guru, the next, company man. Dr. Sawaya became Richard Sawaya, corporate manager at big Los Angeles oil company. We said he did it for the money, which was probably true considering my small Jesuit university couldn’t have been able to match a Fortune 500 multinational on salary and benefits.
No matter what Dr. Sawaya did after that, he’d worked his magic on me. Reading “Paradise Lost” was the first time I’d ever had to analyze a complex and extended concept – a mainstay of Jesuit education. It was a skill I’ve continued to hone over my years as a reporter. It’s one of the things I believe I do well, and why I eventually was attracted to writing about complex topics such as company financials, emerging consumer electronics and other technologies, where I could take convoluted, often arcane topics and, to use an English lit term, “explicate” them for readers.
For that I say, thanks, Dr. Sawaya. By the way, I looked you up online today and see you’re back in academia, at George Washington University in Washington D.C., where you’re vice president of the school’s Office of Government, International, & Corporate Affairs. You’ve also taught Honors classes again. It’s good to know you’re back behind the lectern, a guru helping today’s young minds learn how to think, and maybe even read Milton.
I also was one of Doctor Sawaya’s students from those days of the 1970’s when the price of gas was going up, and we were exploring strange alternative energies like solar and wind so we wouldn’t have to be dependent upon unstable places like the middle east.
Doctor Sawaya (and his dissertation poet, Wallace Stevens) and John Milton were and are inspirations of having a day job and still staying close to the world of literature. So even though I have a day job, I am teaching literature at the local community college, and next week we will be studying Paradise Lost, and many of Doctor Sawaya’s insights will find their way into my lecture. (And I will actually give him occasional credit) There is a marvelous commodious vicus of ricirculation to the life of literature . . .
Thanks for the reminder of a great teacher and great literature.