Font makes a difference.

It makes a difference in the amount of writing I enjoy doing on my computer--how long I can sit in one place and stare at the bumps and bends of my lettered words. Font didn't make a difference, however, to John Milton at the time that he composed Paradise Lost. Blind and dictating, I think the words always mattered more than the font ever did. To him. To most. To me, I'm just trying to force myself to write this thing... I want to be inspired. I think I've only had that kind of divine paper-writing experience three or four times in my college years. High school was different. I don't even count high school anymore. And by divine, I mean that I think the writing of the paper was really the inventing and developing of thought--an experience of the creative, inventive personality of God. Realizations came that would never have come without putting the thoughts down somewhere. Those kind of transient thoughts that seem to dissolve almost as soon as they come... and you flail your arms desperately to try and catch them again once they go. Poetry's another story, of course. Lately, I'm finding my poetry dull. It's all been a set of butter knives in my mind's drawer.

Satan's syntax is a bunch of convoluted clauses that only have the sound of sense and intelligence. They don't actually have much proven syntactical sense, except in terms of representing Satan’s instable and/or duplicitous state of mind. I guess this is interesting. I guess, if I hadn't already spent the whole of the semester focusing on these minute poetic details, I might be a little more excited to spend eight pages talking about them again... in a specific case. Why Satan's syntax like this? Pretty much everyone knows why, don't they? I guess noticing the What is the first step... but perhaps not everyone would notice the What. They might wonder, What in fact is Milton's point in making Satan sound so intelligent and convincing? People who aren't already familiar with Christian doctrine, that is, and who don't already believe that Satan exists and Satan is deceptive and tricky and likes to catch everyone off guard by... using convoluted syntax(?). There you go. That's where I started.

Sorry for doing this to all of you readers... I will try to refrain next time I'm tempted. (Ha, ha. Resist the devil and he will flee... isn't that right?)