In an age that is rapidly losing the inclination and even the ability to read, as if all the physical books in the world were being deposited in landfills or burnt to fuel the engines of their own burning, I’m doing what most people would find inconceivable. I am memorizing Paradise Lost. I am into Book Ten now, and if my count is right, I have mastered 8,145 lines, with 2,420 to go.

I mention it not to boast but to meditate on what reading is, what it is for, and what a world without readers will be, if it can be called a “world” at all, rather than chaos.

As soon as Eve eats the forbidden fruit, she suffers an unwitting reversal in the mind’s orientation toward reality. Instead of wisdom from above, she seeks it from a creature whose kind is beneath hers, from a plant, which she now tends with worship:

From the tree her step she turned,

But first low reverence done, as to the power

That dwelt therein, whose presence had infused

Into the plant sciential sap, derived

From nectar, drink of gods.

When I speak these lines from memory, what comes to my mind is not just the pattern of letters on a page, though I do enjoy such visual flashes. My entire person is involved, voice and vocal memory, bodily movement and attitude, impersonation, reason, judgment. I see the terrible irony that Eve does not see. I remember that when the animals came to Adam to receive their names, they came “crouching low / With blandishment,” as man’s best friend the dog might do. That was their way to acknowledge their master. They are raised up in the presence of man. But Eve now lowers herself beneath something that cannot think at all. The scene is acutely painful and embarrassing.

I read the lines, or I think of them in my mind’s theater, hearing them on stage, lingering ironically over the word “power,” and knowing that Milton is winking at me, suggesting by that little word “as” that there is no such power as Eve supposes. I hear the sardonic phrase “sciential sap,” heightened by the alliteration and the pause that follows, and again my voice draws out the words a little, delaying before “sap,” an anticlimax after the lightly ridiculous adjective “sciential,” and I think of the silly commercial from my childhood, encouraging kids to drink that orange stuff called Tang, “the drink of astronauts.” It is a collapse in dignity from the first prayer we hear Adam and Eve praying, hand in hand, before they retire for the night:

Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,

Both turned, and under open sky adored

The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven,

Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe

And starry pole: Thou also mad’st the night,

Maker omnipotent, and thou the day,

Which we in our appointed work employed

Have finished happy in our mutual help

And mutual love, the crown of all our bliss

Ordained by thee, and this delicious place

For us too large, where thy abundance wants

Partakers, and uncropped falls to the ground.

But thou hast promised from us two a race

To fill the earth, who shall with us extol

Thy goodness infinite, both when we wake

And when we seek, as now, thy gift of sleep.

There they are, together, gazing upon the night sky spangled with stars, and praying not only for a peaceful night, but for the grand future opening before them, one that will bring a race of innumerable human beings to fill the earth and to join them in gratitude and praise. There is nothing low, cringing, sly, or foolish about it. Their simple and direct nobility is moving, all the more in that it feels foreign to us, who are neither so simple nor so noble.

When I commit the passages to memory, I extend and enhance both my reading and the printed words that permit it. Those words do not vanish in the air. They are there, on the pages, in the book. I may turn back to what I have read before, as I often do, if only to check my memory. I take the book at a natural and human pace. It does not distract me with sudden advertisements. It does not set mental snares in my path. I can shut the book while opening it within me, hearing the words again and considering them. Indeed, consideration is what the book rewards, as I let it work its way into my mind. As Milton did, so I too now hear the Latin beneath the English word: to consider, as to gaze upon the sidera, the stars and their constellations above.

Gazing at the stars on a clear night is not the same as looking at a page of stars on a computer screen, and not least because it is nearly impossible to look at that screen without the jitters, the temptation to leap to something else. It is the same with reading a book on a screen. The computer does not possess “sciential sap.” It knows nothing, considers nothing. I can use it as a quick reference tool, not always reliable. It can bring me books I would never be able to find otherwise. But even as it does so, it makes me less and less able to read such books. If I say so of myself, it is true a hundred times over of young people who have never gazed at the stars, or quietly read a book, or sat with a friend in a sunny field to talk. What is called, without irony, Artificial Intelligence will make us more artificial at the cost of our intelligence. I can use a search engine to locate Milton’s uses of the word “low,” and that may be helpful in a limited way for a narrow range of purposes. But no search engine can make me want to think about the motif of gradation in the first place.

It cannot cause me to remember, in the very moment when I read that Eve does “low reverence” to a fruit tree, that Satan has just expressed his disgust at having to belittle himself by entering the body of a snake. He does not love or even like the snake. It is only a vehicle to help bring others down to his misery:

But what will not ambition and revenge

Descend to? Who aspires must down as low

As high he soared, obnoxious first and last

To basest things. Revenge, at first though sweet,

Bitter ere long back on itself recoils;

Let it, I reck not, so it light well-aimed,

Since higher I fall short, on him who now

Excites my envy, this new favorite

Of Heaven, this Man of clay, son of despite,

Whom us the more to spite, his Maker raised

From dust: spite then with spite is best repaid.

We can hear the very spitting of the venom in his words. No Artificial Intelligence can hear that spitting, or can feel the spite, or can consider—again I use a word that suggests patience, calm, openness, judgment—the chasm that Milton shows us between the motives of God and the motives that Satan attributes to God, which reveal more about Satan than about God. It is not revenge alone that recoils, but evil in general. It plunges this cleverest of the demons into a sinkhole of error.

What did Milton expect for his own book? He was wary. He feared he might be writing during an “age too late” for his epic poem. But the age was not too late. The printing press had been invented 200 years before, books were plentiful, and there was not a lot of garbage printed, as the mass-marketed paperback had not been invented, though there might be plenty of scurrilous broadsides in a big city. Milton inherited also two millennia of classical, medieval, and Renaissance learning, pagan and Christian. He knew many languages and could expect that many of his readers would be familiar with Latin at least. He could hear in his mind’s ear and read again in his heart the music of a staggeringly broad sweep of poetic forms, from the hexameters of Virgil to the terza rima of Dante to the ballads of English popular song. The Bible, that book of books, was not only at his fingertips. It was the eye of his soul. One book we know he never read was Paradise Lost, at least not with his physical eyes, which were then quite blind. He did read it again and again with his mind and heart.

Whether we are a people who do read Milton is not in question. We do not. But can we? I am aware that technological developments always exact a cost. But is the gain always worth it? Plato proposed the question about writing itself. His Phaedrus ends with a discussion about the losses incurred when writing takes over from conversation and hearing and memory. That discussion is cautionary, and it shows us why for Plato the dialogue form was so important. He wanted to present to his readers the person of Socrates, in personal relation to other people, with ideas proposed, questioned, rejected, revised, reconsidered, elaborated, set in the balance with others, while never losing the humanity of man’s search for truth about himself and his world.

Phaedrus brings Plato to me, across the gulf of 2,400 years. I have, likewise, Milton near my side, and though I hardly think he was right about everything, his passion for truth I do not doubt, nor his intellectual might and his artistic genius. He is not a Milton-program.

But if I am to read Milton, I must take my time, and I will do so only if I know how to take time. I can’t do it if the ceaseless spritz of images on a screen prevents me from getting to the end of a page or a paragraph or a sentence without distraction. If, moreover, I am induced to rely on what some algorithm decides for me, replacing my judgment with the weight of sheer numbers, even supposing that those who fashion the algorithms have not leaned their elbows on the balance, I will not be thinking at all.

If I do not think, I cannot read. The printing press stoked a fire of literacy all over Europe. The computer might, as I have suggested, be used as an extension of the book. But there is no money in that modest and sober use. As it is used, and I feel it in myself as well, it is a mechanism for extinguishing the habits that make it possible for people to read books, just as social media will raise up people who cannot talk to one another.

Let me not be understood in a superficial sense. If you take the smartphones and other computerized distractions away from children, their minds may heal, and they may soon, if faltering at first, begin to enjoy conversation. But reading involves more. It is a learned habit. It requires a certain cast of mind, self-discipline, collectedness, attention, and even concentration. It is play; it is also work. To read Milton, you must have read some of what he has read. You must have pitched your pavilion in the field of human thought and art. You cannot settle upon Paradise Lost as you might pick up a newspaper. Without a great fund of real knowledge, and not just the sludge of “information” to be gotten from the Internet, you will not be able to make sense of the thousand things he refers to. Without deep experience of language itself, the words will pass you by without meaning, or with but a shallow meaning. You surely will not hear the poem as a symphonic whole. Distraction alone forbids it.

Finally, I extend my point about reading Paradise Lost to the ability to “read” the world: to encounter it as a true world and not a chaos of unmeaning, and to wait upon the self-revelation of created things both animate and inanimate, rather than hastening to reduce them to protoplasm or dust, to be manipulated by raw human will. Here will be one of the great ironies in human history: people fed upon the thin fare of materialist philosophy will be more prone, not less, to despise material creatures in their separate kinds, to use them as mere stuff, and inexorably to be used as mere stuff in turn. We see the collapse of this fundamental literacy, a literacy of being, in the professed inability of our teachers and political leaders to tell a boy from a girl; a human organism from a patch of skin; a living creature from a machine.

The goodness of matter and of all creation is at the heart of Paradise Lost. It is why when the archangel Raphael comes to Eden to warn Adam and Eve about the enemy who is plotting their fall, he enjoys dinner with them, “not in mist, the common gloss / Of theologians, but with keen despatch / Of real hunger.” And when Adam and Eve pray their morning prayer, they call upon all creation to praise God, including the four elements themselves, whose “ceaseless change / Vary to our great Maker still new praise.”

All the world is fascinating to them, not because they are inexperienced, but because everything is filled with God’s creative bounty. That is why, when Raphael describes for them the six days of creation, Milton dwells upon the distinct goodness and beauty of different kinds of creatures, even the tiniest, such as the insects:

Those waved their limber fans

As wings, in smallest lineaments exact,

In all the liveries decked of summer’s pride,

With spots of gold or purple, azure or green.

That is not the observation of a specialist in entomology, whose livelihood depends on bugs under a microscope. It is the observation of a human reader of things, a patient man, remembering the forms and the colors he once saw when his eyes were not blind.

So I am committing Paradise Lost to my memory, to my heart. I, a Roman Catholic, who have spent more than 40 years teaching literature to young people, who have stood in opposition while the works of Milton and other poetic lights in our language have been traduced or despised and abandoned by one college after another, I who love the created world, the human person, and the humane arts and letters, find a friend and guide in Milton. I write what I write for those who can read. And I take heart from Milton, blind, beset with enemies, but calling upon his heavenly Muse,

though fallen on evil days,

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,

In darkness, and with dangers compassed round

And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visit’st my slumbers nightly, or when morn

Purples the east: still govern thou my song,

Urania, and fit audience find, though few.