Eric's Beijing Diary

I was sitting in the Bridge Cafe the other day reading Milton's Paradise Lost, when the guy sitting behind me came up and asked me what I was reading. He had noticed the web site I was looking at--a very well designed page by a professor at Dartmouth. He told me he had been a student of that professor. I told him I really appreciated the fact that this professor had taken so much trouble to put this together and then released it to the public.

I was in the library of my former university some time ago, when I discovered a copy of Samuel Johnson''s Lives of the Poets, and becamse interested in the section on Milton. But before really getting into it, I decided that perhaps I ought to spend some time actually reading Milton. It's hard to believe that my sixtieth birthday is right around the corner, but I have never read Paradise Lost. So I set myself to the task, and thus I found this web site. Actually, the reason I was interested in reading Samuel Johnson''s classic in the first place, is because I had started reading Boswell''s classic biography of Johnson several years ago and decided that it would be more meaningful if I had actually read something by Johnson before I began the biography. So I'm reading Milton so that I can read Johnson so that I can read Boswell.