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You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
--
John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)

 

Aldous Huxley

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God created man for fellowship… The fall of man ruined that and Paradise—that is, the garden of Eden—was lost, but on the new earth paradise will be regained and God will again fellowship with mankind in a unique sense.

 

Paul Enns

 

“Why, if I may ask, are you called the Blue Knight?”
“I am thought to be melancholy.”
“On what evidence?”
“Just my temperament, I suppose. I’ve always been rather melancholy, even as a child. Spent a lot of time plucking at the counterpane, as it were. It grew worse as I grew older. Also, I published a book. It was called On the Impossibility of Paradise.”
“What was the argument?”
“I argued that the idea of a former paradise, which had been lost and might be regained either in this world or in the next, did not square with my experience.”
“Personal experience.”
“Yes. I wasn’t happy even in the womb. The womb, for me, was far from a paradise. I remember distinctly. My mother was a very modern person—advanced, don’t you know. Fond of Alban Berg, the Wozzeck man. Not only was I forced repeatedly to listen to Wozzeck, in the womb, but also to Lulu, which is even worse, from the fetal point of view. These horrors aside, there was the poetry of Wyndham Lewis, proprietor of Blast. Blast was the name of his magazine. Can you imagine calling your magazine Blast? Going to crack consciousness wide open, he was. These tidderly-push artists and their conceits—the poetry was of a piece. I had to listen to it. In the womb. In addition, there were certain odd substances entering the bloodstream—do you know what Kif is?”
“No idea.”
“Better thus. In sum, my womb time was quite hellish, and upon being expelled I found the larger arena not much of an improvement. I don’t mean to complain, of course,I’m just trying to suggest—”
“No, no,” said Sir Roger. “Say on. Isupposen we should be doing search-and-destroy, but your remarks are of the greatest interest to me.”
“Good of you,” said the Blue Knight. “The basic contradiction I located or felt I had located was in terms of dramatic values. Paradise, the Fall, and the return to Paradise—it’s not a story. It’s too symmetrical. There are no twists. Just Paradise, zip, Fall, zip, and Paradise again, zip. And I had a very strong feeling, an intuition if you will, that even if Paradise were regained it would have music by Milhaud and frescoes by the Italian Futurists.”

 

Donald Barthelme

 

John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Sampson Agonista. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honorable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely'd that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First.

 

John Milton

 

There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is — and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

 

Henri Barbusse

 

Worship thou God in such wise that if thy worship lead thee to the fire, no alteration in thine adoration would be produced, and so likewise if thy recompense should be paradise. Thus and thus alone should be the worship which befitteth the one True God. Shouldst thou worship Him because of fear, this would be unseemly in the sanctified Court of His presence, and could not be regarded as an act by thee dedicated to the Oneness of His Being. Or if thy gaze should be on paradise, and thou shouldst worship Him while cherishing such a hope, thou wouldst make God’s creation a partner with Him, notwithstanding the fact that paradise is desired by men.
Fire and paradise both bow down and prostrate themselves before God. That which is worthy of His Essence is to worship Him for His sake, without fear of fire, or hope of paradise.

 

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