How My Light Is Spent

Plateworthy (my husband - a literatura academic) walked into our home office on Monday night to find me reading in quickly fading evening light. He says to me, "Alright Milton, you gonna turn the lights on?"

So I ask him, "Is that how Milton went blind? Not some congenital thing?"

"Sure," he says. "He had to dictate Paradise Lost. The whole thing. Some other things too like (he says this smiling as if to make his point) the sonnet that begins 'When I consider how my light is spent' about his blindness." I love that he remembers this sort of thing -entire passages- even though Milton is not his area.

Then in seconds, he pulls Milton's Complete Poems and Prose from the shelf, flip flip and bam, there it is, Sonnet XIX, and it is lovely.

I love that he brings beautiful words into my life. It's like that line in Wonderboys, "She was a junkie for the printed word, and lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice."
I really get that. And a phrase like "how my light is spent" is something I could chew on for a few days. Warm chocolate chip cookies I never knew were there.

How my light is spent.

What an image, a phrase, a challenge.
Not just about blindness, but about how life is a brief light.
In.
Flicker.
and then
Out.

How will I spend it?
How will I share it?
What will my life illuminate?

I don't conserve my light either. I don't limit my attention to things that are good or beautiful. I don't always spend my light in ways that make me or any one else happy or the better for it.

But I should.
Because I am so damned lucky.



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