TRUST

I said,  
"We'll lose". 

You said,  
"We'll do that together too." 

And guess what, Cap? 

We Lost. 

You Weren't There. 

No Trust. 

Liar.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUST AND CONFIDENCE

YOUTH: There is something about this 'affirmative resignation' that sounds pessimistic. 

It's just too bleak if the upshot of all this lengthy discussion is resignation. 

PHILOSOPHER: Is that so? 

Resignation has the connotation of seeing clearly with fortitude and acceptance. 

Having a firm grasp on the truth of things – that is resignation. 

There is nothing pessimistic about it.

YOUTH: A firm grasp on The Truth....

PHILOSOPHER: Of course, just because one has arrived at affirmative resignation as one's self-acceptance, it does not automatically follow that one finds community feeling. 

That is the reality. 

When one is switching from attachment to self to concern for others, the second key concept – confidence in others – becomes absolutely essential. 

YOUTH: Confidence in others. In other words, believing in others? 

PHILOSOPHER; Here, I will consider the words 'believing in others' in the context of distinguishing trust from confidence. 

First, when we speak of Trust, we are referring to something that comes with set conditions. 

In English, it is referred to as credit. 

For example, when one wants to borrow money from a bank, one has to have some kind of security. 

The Bank calculates the amount of the loan based on the value of that security, and says, 'We will lend you this much.' 

The attitude of 'we will lend it to you on the condition that you will pay it back,' or 'we will lend you as much as you are able to pay back' is not one of having confidence in someone. It is Trust.

YOUTH : Well, that's how bank financing works, I guess.

PHILOSOPHER: By contrast, from the standpoint of Adlerian psychology, the basis of interpersonal relations is not founded on Trust but on Confidence. 

YOUTH : And 'confidence' in this case is ...?

PHILOSOPHER : It is doing without any set conditions whatsoever when believing in others. 

Even if one does not have sufficient objective grounds for trusting someone, one believes. 

One believes unconditionally without concerning oneself with such things as security. That is Confidence.

YOUTH : Believing unconditionally? 

So, it's back to your pet notion of neighbourly love? 

PHILOSOPHER : Of course, if one believes in others without setting any conditions whatsoever, there will be times when one gets taken advantage of. 

Just like the guarantor of a debt, there are times when one may suffer damages. 

The attitude of continuing to believe in someone even in such instances is what we call Confidence. 

YOUTH: Only a naive dimwit would do such a thing! 

I guess you hold with the doctrine of innate human goodness, while I hold with the doctrine of innate human evilness. 

Believe unconditionally in complete strangers, and you'll just get used and abused. 

PHILOSOPHER: And there are also times when someone deceives you, and you get used that way. 

But look at it from the standpoint of someone who has been taken advantage of. 

There are people who will continue to believe in you unconditionally even if you are the one who has taken advantage of them. 

People who will have confidence in you no matter how they are treated. 

Would you be able to betray such a person again and again?

PHILOSOPHER: I am sure it would be quite difficult for you to do such a thing.

YOUTH: After all that, are you saying one has to appeal to the emotions? 

To keep on holding the faith, like a saint, and act on the conscience of the other person? 

You're telling me that morals don't matter to Adler, but isn't that exactly what we're talking about here?

PHILOSOPHER: No, it is not. 

What would you say is the opposite of confidence? 

YOUTH: An antonym of confidence? Uh.....

PHILOSOPHER: It is Doubt. 

Suppose you have placed 'doubt' at the foundation of your interpersonal relations. 

That you live your life doubting other people – doubting your friends, and even your family and those you love. 

What sort of relationship could possibly arise from that? 

The Other Person will detect the doubt in your eyes in an instant.

He or she will have an instinctive understanding that 'this person does not have confidence in me'.  

Do you think one would be able to build some kind of positive relationship from that point? 

It is precisely because we lay a foundation of unconditional confidence
 that it is possible for us to build a deep relationship.

YOUTH: Okay, I guess.

PHILOSOPHER: The way to understand Adlerian psychology is simple. 

Right now, you are thinking, 'If were to have confidence in someone unconditionally, I would just get taken advantage of.'  

However, you are not the one who decides whether or not to take advantage. That is the other person's task. 

All you need to do is think, 'What should I do?'  

If you are telling yourself, 'I'll give it to him if he isn't going take advantage of me', it is just a relationship of trust that is based on security or conditions.

PHILOSOPHER: Yes. As I have stated repeatedly, carrying out the separation of tasks returns life to an astonishingly simple form. 

But while the principle of the separation of tasks is easy to grasp, putting it into practice is difficult. I recognise that.

YOUTH: Then, you are telling me to keep on having confidence in everyone, to keep on believing in all other people even when they deceive me, and just go on being a naive fool? 

That's not philosophy or psychology or anything of the sort – it's just the preaching of a zealot!

PHILOSOPHER; I reject that definitively.  

Adlerian psychology is not saying 'have confidence in others unconditionally' on the basis of a moralistic system of values.  

Unconditional confidence is a means for making your interpersonal relationship with a person better, and for building a horizontal relationship. 

If you do not have the desire to make your relationship with that person better, then go ahead and sever it – because carrying out the severing is your task.

YOUTH: Then, what if I've placed unconditional confidence in a friend in order to make our relationship better? 

I've jumped through all sorts of hoops for this friend, gladly satisfied any requests for money, and been unstinting with my time and efforts in his regard. 

But even in such cases, there are times when one is taken advantage of. 

For example, if one were horribly taken advantage of by a person one has believed in completely, wouldn't that experience lead one to a lifestyle with an 'other people are my enemies' outlook?

PHILOSOPHER: It seems that you have not yet gained an understanding of the goal of confidence. 

Suppose, for example, that you are in a love relationship, but you are having doubts about your partner and you think to yourself, 'I'll bet she's cheating on me.' 

And you start making desperate efforts in search of evidence to prove that.  

What do you think would happen as a result? 

YOUTH: Well, I guess that would depend on the situation.

PHILOSOPHER: No, in every instance, you would find an abundance of evidence that she has been cheating on you.

YOUTH: Wait? Why is that?

PHILOSOPHER: Your partner's casual remarks, her tone when talking to someone on the phone, the times when you can't reach her... 

As long as you are looking with doubt in your eyes, everything around you will appear to be evidence that she is cheating on you. 

Even if she is not.

YOUTH: Hmm.

PHILOSOPHER: Right now, you are only concerned about the times you were taken advantage of, and nothing else. 

You focus only on the pain from the wounds you sustained on such occasions. 

But if you are afraid to have confidence in others, in the long run,

you will not be able to build deep relationships with anyone.

YOUTH: Well, I see what you're getting at – the main objective, which is to build deep relationships. 

But still, being taken advantage of is scary, and that's the reality, isn't it? 

PHILOSOPHER; If it is a shallow relationship, when it falls apart the pain will
be slight. 

And the joy that relationship brings each day will also be slight. 

It is precisely because one can gain the courage to enter into deeper relationships by having confidence in others that the joy of one's interpersonal relations can grow, and one's joy in life can grow, too.

YOUTH: No! That's not what I was talking about, you're changing the subject again. 

The courage to overcome the fear of being taken advantage of – where does it come from?

PHILOSOPHER: It comes from Self-Acceptance. 

If one can simply accept oneself as one is, and ascertain what one can do and what one cannot, one becomes able to understand that 'taking advantage' is the other person's task, and getting to the core of 'confidence in others' becomes less difficult. 

YOUTH: You're saying that taking advantage of someone is the other person's task, and one can't do anything about it? 

That I should be resigned, in an affirmative way? 

Your arguments always ignore our emotions. 

What does one do about all the anger and sadness one feels when one is taken advantage of?

PHILOSOPHER: When one is sad, one should be sad to one's heart's content. 


It is precisely when one tries to escape the pain and sadness that one gets stuck and ceases to be able to build deep relationships with anyone. 

Think about 
it this way. We can Believe. And we can Doubt. 

But we are aspiring to see others as our comrades. 

To believe or to doubt – The Choice should be clear.

NATASHA: 

It's been 23 days since Thanos came to Earth. 

World Governments are in pieces. 

The parts that are still working are trying to take a census. 
And it looks like he did... exactly what he said he was going to do. 

Thanos wiped out 50%, of all living creatures.

TONY: 

Where is he now? Where?

STEVE: 
We don't know.

ROCKET: 
He just opened a portal and walked through. 

[Cut to a shot of a sullen-looking Thor, sitting on a bench, seemingly deep in thought.]

TONY: 
What's wrong with him?

ROCKET: 
He's pissed. He thinks he failed. 
Which of course he did, 
but there's a lot of that's goin' around, ain't there?

TONY: 
Honestly, until this exact second, I thought you were a Build-A-Bear.

ROCKET: 
Maybe I am.

NATASHA: 
We've been hunting Thanos for three weeks now. 
Deep Space scans and satellites, and we got nothing.

STEVE: 
Tony, you fought him.

TONY: 
Who told you that? I didn't fight him. 
No, he wiped my face with a planet while the Bleecker Street Magician gave away the stone. 
That's what happened. There was no fight.

STEVE: 
Did he give you any clues, any coordinates, anything?

TONY: 
Pfft! I saw this coming a few years back. 
I had a vision. I didn't wanna believe it. 
Thought I was dreaming.

STEVE: 
Tony, I'm gonna need you to focus.

TONY: 
And I needed you. As in, past tense. 
That trumps what you need. It's too late buddy. 
Sorry. You know what I need.

[Tony stands, pushing things off the table with a clatter. Everyone winces at the noise.]

TONY: 

I need a shave. 

And I believe I remember telling you, Cap.

[Tony goes for Steve. Rhodey quickly comes in front of him, trying to stop him.]

RHODEY: 

Tony, Tony, Tony, stop!

TONY: 

Otherwise what we needed was 

A Suit of Armor Around The World!

 Remember that? 

Whether it impacted our precious Freedom or not - 

That's what we needed!

STEVE: 

Well, that didn't work out, did it?

TONY: 

I said, 
"We'll Lose". 

You said, 
"We'll do that together too." 

And guess what, Cap? 

We Lost. 

You weren't there. 

But that's what we do, right? 

Our best work after the fact? 

We're the Avengers, we're the Avengers. 

Not the Prevengers, right?

RHODEY: 

Okay, you made your point. 

Just sit down, ok?

TONY: 
Nah, nah, nah. 
[He pushes Rhodey away] 

Here's my point.

RHODEY: 
Sit down!

TONY: 
[Referring to Carol] 
She's great, by the way. 
We need you. You're new blood.

RHODEY: 
Tony!

TONY: 

Bunch of tired old mills! 

I got nothing for you, Cap! 
I got no coordinates, no clues, 
no plan, no options. 

Zero. Zip. Nada. 

No Trust. Liar.

[Steve looks affected by Tony's words. The old friends just gaze at each other. After a moment, Tony rips his Arc Reactor from his chest and shoves it into Steve's hand.]

TONY: 
Here, take this. 
You find him, and you put that on. 
You hide.

[Tony falls to the ground. Steve is by his side and everyone is starting to gather.]

STEVE: 
Tony!

TONY: 
I'm fine. I...

[Tony falls into a heap, unconscious.]

[Cut to a shot of Tony on a bed, with Pepper at his side.]

RHODEY: 
Bruce gave him a sedative. 
He's gonna be out for the rest of the day.

CAROL: 
You guys take care of him. 
And I'll bring Xorrian Elixir when I come back.

RHODEY: 
Where are you going?

CAROL: 
To Kill Thanos.

NATASHA: 
You know, we usually work as a team around here, and between you and I, we're also a little fragile. 
We realize this is more your territory, but this is our fight too.

ROCKET: 
Do you even know where he is?

CAROL: 
I know people who might.

NEBULA: 
Don't bother. I can tell you where Thanos is. 
Thanos spent a long time trying to perfect me. 
Then when he worked, he talked about his Great Plan. 

Even disassembled, I wanted to please him. 

I'd ask "Where Would We Go?",  
once His Plan was complete. 

His answer was always the same: 

To The Garden.

RHODEY: 
That's cute, Thanos has a retirement plan.

STEVE: 
So where is he then?

ROCKET: 
When Thanos snapped his fingers, Earth became ground zero for a power surge of ridiculously cosmic proportions. 

No one's ever seen anything like it... 
Until two days ago. 

[A hologram of a planet pops up, with a shockwave visibly traversing the surface.]

NEBULA: 
On this planet. 
Thanos is there.

NATASHA: 
He used the stones again.

BRUCE: 
Hey, Hey, we'd be going in short-handed, you know.

RHODEY: 
Look, he's still got the stones, so...

CAROL: 
So let's get him. 
We'll use them to bring everyone back.

RHODEY: 
Just like that?

STEVE: 
Yeah, just like that.

[Steve and Carol share a knowing look.]

NATASHA: 
Even if there's a small chance that we can undo this... 
I mean we owe it to everyone who's not in this room to try.

BRUCE: 
If we do this, how do we know it's gonna end any differently than it did before?

CAROL: 
Because before, you didn't have me.

RHODEY: 
Hey, New Girl, everyone here is about that superhero life. 
And if you don't mind my asking, where the hell have you been all this time.

CAROL: 
There are a lot of other planets in the universe. 
And unfortunately, they didn't have you guys.

[Thor, who has been eating a snack behind all this time, stands up and walks over to Carol. He holds his hand up, and catches Stormbreaker as it flies over to him, missing Carol by inches. But Carol doesn't even flinch, instead smiling at the God of Thunder.]

THOR: 
I like this one.

STEVE: 
Let's go get this son of a bitch. 

[Cut to a shot of everyone except for Carol and Tony aboard the Benatar.]

The 3 Quarks

Why Do We Scream at Each Other?

" Maury Gellman, Nobel Prize-winner, got his Three-Quark-Model out of Finnegan’s Wake…. The Three Quarks are major characters in Finnegan’s Wake, the two twins who are opposites, and the third twin who is both twins combined and still a third independent character.

In order to understand thoughts like that, two twins who are the opposite, and the third who combines both of them, you gotta think in a Taoist way – like the joke which goes : –

Q : ‘How Many Zen Masters Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?’

Three

A : ‘One to Change it, and One Not to Change it.’

That’s the logic of the Shem, Ham, Japeth relationship in Finnegan’s Wake, which is also the Bacon, Shakespeare, Raleigh relationship, and the Tom, Dick and Harry, and many other types of Trilogies of The Human Mind, including The Holy Trinity.  

SPOCK–KIRK–McCOY

David,

Son of Kirk
(Which Means 'Church')

Kirk (Which Means 'Church'),

Father of None,

Captain without Sail

Mc.Coy, Leonard H.,

Son of David

And Godfather, Dogfather and Coo, which is "

Milton (ENGL 220) An introduction to John Milton: Man, Poet, and Legend.

Milton's place at the center of the English literary canon is asserted, articulated, and examined through a discussion of Milton's long, complicated association with literary power. The conception of Miltonic power and its calculated use in political literature is analyzed in the feminist writings of Lady Mary Chudleigh, Mary Astell, and Virginia Woolf. Later the god-like qualities often ascribed to Miltonic authority are considered alongside Satan's excursus on the constructed nature of divine might in Paradise Lost, and the notorious character's method of analysis is shown to be a useful mode of encountering the author himself. 00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton's Power as a Poet 15:37 - Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes 19:42 - Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes

24:03 - Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes

32:20 - Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website:

Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton

Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton’s Power as a Poet [00:00:00]

Professor John Rogers: For a vast number of complicated reasons, Milton has invited for 350 years now a uniquely violent – and I do think it’s a violent – response to the particular question of his value as a poet. And the violence, I think, of this reaction is due in large part to our tendency to think of Milton and of Milton’s work in terms of the category of power. So I’ve given this first lecture a title, the title being “Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton,” because any introduction to Milton has to confront the long-standing conviction in English letters of Milton’s power or his strength as a poet. It’s practically impossible to begin a reading of Milton without the burden of innumerable prejudices and preconceptions. Milton’s reputation always precedes him. And in fact that’s always been the case even in his lifetime. Even if we’ve heard of nothing of Milton the poet or nothing of Milton the man, we’re certainly, of course, likely to have heard of Adam and Eve and of the story of the Garden of Eden, and so it’s especially difficult to read Paradise Lost without bringing to it some sense of the power of the religious problems, the theological and ethical problems, that that story seems so powerfully to set out to address.

Now readers of English literature talk about Milton very differently from the way they talk about other writers. Historically, it has not been pleasure or wit or beauty that has been associated with the experience of reading Milton. Those are the categories of value that we tend to associate or to affiliate with our other favorite writers, writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, for example. But in our collective cultural consciousness, if there is a such thing, whether we like him or not we tend to think of John Milton as powerful. And the reasons for this coupling of the name Milton and of this idea or the metaphor of power, I think, are worth looking in to.

Power is a conceptual category that Milton brooded on and cultivated his entire writing life. From a very early age, Milton nursed the image of himself as a powerful poet. In Milton we have a man who was able to state – now just think about this for a moment, I take this to be an absolutely remarkable fact – we have in Milton a man who was able to state categorically in his early twenties–so just a few years older than you are now– that the epic poem that he would not even begin writing for another twenty-five years would become an unforgettable work of English literature. Milton anticipated and lovingly invested all of his energy in his future literary power and his future literary fame. He anticipated this power much as his father, a reasonably well-to-do banker, might have anticipated long-term earnings from a particularly risky business venture.

In Milton’s case this investment in power paid off. Milton would eventually come to feel so comfortable with the mantle of power that he was able to do much more than simply rewrite the first books of the Bible (which is of course one of the things that he accomplished in Paradise Lost, and that is itself no mean undertaking). By the end of his life, though, Milton would in effect try to rewrite everything. After he’d published all of his major poems, he began publishing a spate of works that attempted to re-create British culture from the ground up. He invented his own system of philosophical logic. He published a treatise that he had written earlier on grammar, inventing his own system for the understanding and the learning of the Latin language. He wrote a long and detailed history of Britain, attempting to create the meaning of that little island that he always assumed was God’s chosen nation. And finally, and probably for Milton most important, Milton wrote a theology, inventing in effect his own religion; and Milton’s Protestantism looks like no one else’s, before or since. There’s a real sense, I think, in which Milton wanted to re-create all of Western culture or to re-create all of Western culture in his own image. Regardless of what we think of the success of that example or of the appeal of the attempt to do such a thing, the amazing thing, I think, is that Milton felt so empowered even to embark on such an enormous project. And readers of Milton ever since have had to confront not just Milton’s writing but this unspeakable sense of empowerment that underlies just about everything that Milton writes. And so it seems to me that a useful introduction to the poetry of Milton would be a look at some of the various types of power that Milton imagines in his work and some of the types of power that literary history has tended to confer upon Milton the man, the image of Milton the man, and of Milton’s writing.

Now, probably the form of power that we most readily associated with John Milton involves his position at the dead center of the English literary canon. This goes beyond questioning. He’s an object of worship by British and American institutions of higher education, and my guess is that few of you have failed to observe that it’s practically impossible to graduate from Yale with a Bachelor of Arts in English without having read Paradise Lost either in English 125, or DS Litm or, in fact, in a course just like this one. Those of you who are taking this course because you have to take one of the pre-1800s and Milton is one of those, you are more than entitled to ask why the poet, this poet, Milton, is exercising this institutional sway over you as you go about choosing your courses or perhaps as you experience your courses in some way as having been chosen for you.

It would be utterly inadequate for us to account for this institutional and surreal institutional power that Milton holds over us by stating blandly that Milton is the greatest English poet. That’s the easy answer obviously, and of course it’s not untrue. But we can do better than that. We can anatomize some of the forms of power that have been most commonly attributed to this greatest English poet. There is first the understandable aesthetic power, the power of the beauty of Milton’s verse, an aesthetic power that’s often thought or felt to inhere somewhere in the poetry itself. In fact for readers of Paradise Lost, and this has been an experience now for a few hundred years, it does often seem as if there were some mysterious life force, a pulsating through Milton’s dense and driving lines of unrhymed, iambic pentameter. And now there’s also the power that Milton himself claimed was behind the poetry of Paradise Lost. Milton insisted–and it’s completely possible that he might actually have believed–that God Himself was responsible for composing the poetry of Paradise Lost, that John Milton was merely the conduit for God’s first serious attempt at an epic poem. And so in this perspective we have an image of the awesome power of the Deity Himself thundering away behind every jot and tittle of Milton’s great epic.

But for Milton’s contemporaries in the seventeenth century, Milton’s power really wasn’t at all aesthetic or even religious in nature. Milton’s power was primarily seen as social and political and cultural. This is a wildly anachronistic use of terms, but there’s nonetheless a lot of sense of it: Milton was essentially a left-wing political radical and it was widely feared by his more timid contemporaries that his writings would seduce his readers in to rejecting good, old-fashioned, traditional religious and social values. There was a lot of validity to that contemporary cultural fear. Milton was a revolutionary. He was responsible for writing the first justification for an armed rebellion against a legitimate monarch, the first to publish such a work in, essentially, all of Europe. Milton actually wrote that it was the duty, not just the right but the duty, of a nation to rise up and dethrone through execution an unjust, though legitimate, king. Milton in fact was largely responsible in a cultural sense for the fact that the armed rebellion of England’s civil war, what we think of as the Puritan Revolution, actually led to the execution by decapitation of England’s monarch Charles the First in 1649. And on top of all of this political revolution, the political radicalism, Milton was one of the first intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favor not only of divorce – Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility – but also he argued in favor of the right to plural marriage, polygamy. He was branded as a radical and dangerous debunker of traditional Christian family values.

Now, many of you know that Milton in his later years was blind, and the fact of his blindness was in his own day frequently cited by contemporary preachers, men at the pulpit, as an example of exactly how God punishes those who dare to write against the king or those who dare to write against the institution of marriage or the family. And Milton’s power for so many of these contemporaries was seen as palpably destructive and truly frightening. Obviously, it goes without saying that today the assessment of Milton as some kind of imminent social threat or some sort of social force in terms of the radical nature of political power – that has taken a sharp turn. Milton is much more likely imagined to wield – and if you have any sense of what the mythology surrounding Milton is, you would have to agree with this – a socially conservative power over his readers.

In the debates ranging for the last thirty years or so over the value of traditional pedagogy and over the value of canonical reading lists, Milton is always cited, invariably cited, as the canon’s most stalwart representative of oppressive religious and social values. There’s no question: Milton is the dead white male poet par excellence in English letters certainly, and his poetry works, at least from this point of view, to solidify those dead white male values, whatever those are, in the unsuspecting minds of his readers, none of whom obviously are dead and many of whom are neither white nor male. Milton’s power from this perspective of the radical cultural critique is really not so different from the power of the late Jerry Falwell or someone like Rush Limbaugh. There is something insidious and culturally malicious and powerful about the social conservatism of what is thought to be his voice.

Now this is the contemporary picture of John Milton and this more or less contemporary picture of Milton as a powerful force of conservatism derives in large part from the English writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote about Milton during the 1920s. It’s Woolf’s image that’s probably the one that’s most firmly rooted in the minds of Milton’s readers today. For Virginia Woolf, especially in A Room of One’s Own, the dead writer Milton exercises an active power at the present moment as he forces his female readers to accept their subordinate place in society; and the text of Milton, and especially of Paradise Lost, therefore has to be seen as an active, persistently malignant conveyor of patriarchal oppression. Now, like all judgments of literary value and literary power and force, the twentieth-century feminist evaluation of Milton, Virginia Woolf’s, has a complicated and long prehistory, and it’s worth our while to look briefly at some of the complicated steps by which an evaluation like Virginia Woolf’s actually comes in to being. So let me take you back. You can now look at your handouts. Let me take you back to the seventeenth century, up to the very beginning of the literary reception of John Milton.

Milton, who had died in 1674, had established himself as a great English poet within twenty or so years of his death. As early as the late seventeenth century, Milton had already entered what we can think of as the English literary canon. For many of his younger contemporaries, he was a canonical authority whose wisdom, whose mere opinions, could be cited as proof, as some sort of indisputable evidence, for one position or another And an extraordinarily ambitious poet like Milton naturally derived a great deal of satisfaction, I’m convinced, in his own lifetime, in anticipating just this kind of posthumous respect and worship, the fantasy of his fellow Englishmen quoting him as an authority much as he himself had for so many decades quoted scripture.
Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:15:37]

Now, one of the earliest – and I think this is a remarkable fact – one of the earliest citations of Paradise Lost that actually appears in print in the seventeenth century comes from the proto-feminist writer Lady Mary Chudleigh. Chudleigh dared to argue – and it’s an amazing argument, given the time – in 1699 Chudleigh argued that a woman could be considered and should be considered as excellent a creature as a man, that women might actually be as ontologically valuable as men. And in making such a point, Chudleigh naturally had to confront – as writers have for millennia – Chudleigh had to confront the problem of the scriptural account of the priority of the sexes, the suggestion that many readers extract from the Book of Genesis in the Bible that the initial creation of the male of the species, Adam, seems to establish the privileged rank of the entire male sex. And so Chudleigh attempts to demonstrate – and this is the passage at the top of the handout – Chudleigh attempts to demonstrate that the Genesis story of Adam and Eve establishes no such thing. She writes,

    Woman’s being created last will not be a very great argument to debase the dignity of the female sex. If some of the men own this [she continues] ‘tis more likely to be true. The great Milton, a grave author, brings in Adam thus speaking to Eve in Paradise Lost [and then she quotes Adam speaking to Eve], “Oh, fairest of creation, last and best of all God’s works.”

The great Milton can be invoked here because he has already been established as an authority. He’s already been established as a figure whose very word possesses something like an indisputable cultural power. So as a very “grave author” – and this is what Chudleigh is implying – Milton can tell us something potentially true about the priority of the sexes.

Of course–and you know this to be the case from your own writing of papers in the English department– like any literary critic who ever tried to write an analysis of anything, Chudleigh has no choice but to nudge the lines that she’s quoting out of context. It’s been said that to quote anybody is necessarily to misrepresent him, and this fact is obviously a very good thing for Lady Mary Chudleigh since Milton would certainly not himself have wanted to suggest that women are superior to men. Milton, in fact, soon goes on in Paradise Lost – right after this very passage that she cites, Milton the narrator berates Adam for his overvaluation of his wife through the character of the Archangel Raphael. I think this is one of the great ironies of English literary history, certainly in the reception of the poet Milton, that one of the very first published discussions of Milton’s epic attempts to enlist John Milton as a proponent of feminism.

Now we don’t have to be overly concerned here with what I take to be Chudleigh’s generous oversight of Milton’s generally sexist bias. What’s important for our immediate purposes is her identification of Milton as a cultural authority. He’s a literary power, a figure who could be called upon to supply the voice of tradition in itself. He can be called upon in fact exactly as he is by Lady Mary here. He can be called upon to contradict scripture: and it’s this power to contradict the Word of God that makes Milton a force than which it’s hard to imagine anything more powerful.
Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:19:42]

Now as you can see from the handout, Milton is discussed in a very different manner a year later in a work published by Mary Astell in 1700 and in an even more remarkably feminist cry for the liberation of women from what she describes and characterizes as domestic oppression. Astell writes the following:

    Patience and submission are the only comforts that are left to a poor people who groan under tyranny unless they are strong enough to break the yoke. Not Milton himself would cry up liberty to poor female slaves or plead for the lawfulness or resisting a private tyranny.

So Milton for Astell is hardly the embodiment of orthodoxy that he is for Lady Mary Chudleigh. For Astell, Milton remains the subversive revolutionary whose treatises against the tyranny of the Stuart monarchy, whose treatises against the tyranny of Charles the First established his reputation as a liberator, a liberator of all of the oppressed and enslaved citizens of England, and that’s Milton’s rhetoric; that rhetoric belongs to Milton himself. But Astell resents, of course, Milton here, and what she resents is the limitation of his subversiveness. He refused to extend his critique of tyranny in the political realm to a critique of man’s domestic tyranny over woman in the private realm, in the domestic sphere. It’s as if Mary Astell were saying, “Well, Milton was on the right track. He simply didn’t go far enough. He didn’t extend the logic of his position.”

Now it has to be said that Mary Astell’s image of Milton is probably the product of a much closer reading of Paradise Lost than Lady Mary Chudleigh’s was. Astell certainly seems to have noticed Milton’s notorious and, of course, deplorable line in Paradise Lost about God’s creation of Adam and Eve: “He for God only, she for God in him,” Milton’s narrator tells us of God’s creation of Adam and Eve. Mary Astell is clearly responding to this. Her statement points to a persistent worry, and it’s a worry that exists even now in the twentieth century about the nature of Milton’s power. Is this guy a revolutionary or is he a reactionary? Astell distinguishes Milton’s cry against political tyranny from her own critique, her own cry against the patriarchal tyranny, and in making this distinction she’s exposing something that I take to be extremely interesting. She’s exposing the uncomfortable affinity between two competing, equally progressive social movements. You’ll see this phenomenon manifest itself throughout your reading of Milton, I’m convinced; and what we see here is the strange proximity, and it’s often a very uncomfortable proximity, of Milton’s rhetoric of political liberation to the proto-feminist rhetoric of domestic liberation that is just beginning to emerge at the end of theseventeenth century.

Now in the middle years of the seventeenth century during the English revolution that saw the execution of the king and saw the establishment of a non-monarchic republican government, Milton had practically invented the formal language, the literary language, of insubordination. He developed an entire vocabulary, a rhetoric of righteous disobedience, of resistance, of protest and revolution. And I think it’s a measure of the power of Milton’s anti-tyrannical language that it can be used against Milton himself. A writer like Mary Astell can employ Milton’s revolutionary rhetoric to advance a cause to which John Milton himself would of course have had difficulty subscribing; a dead Milton could exercise a social power that had nothing whatsoever to do with the living Milton’s own social views.
Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes [00:24:03]

Now we’ll fast forward a couple of centuries and look at Virginia Woolf. By the time we get to Woolf in the early part of the twentieth century, Milton has come to be associated with essentially all of these ways of thinking about power, however contradictory they are. He’s the very voice of traditional wisdom for some, as he was for Lady Mary Chudleigh. And he’s the voice of political subversiveness for others, as he was for Mary Astell. He’s the friend of women everywhere, at least for a few of his female readers in the eighteenth century, and for many he’s the very embodiment of oppressive patriarchy.

I mentioned earlier that it’s Virginia Woolf who’s largely responsible for our sense of Milton’s identity as an oppressive patriarchal literary voice, but Virginia Woolf, too, had inherited these contradictory ways of thinking about Milton and about Milton’s power. And you can see from the handout that in 1924, Woolf is beginning to formulate her dazzling feminist critique of the masculine traditions – what she thinks of as the masculine traditions of literary writing – and she’s not just one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have been men (everyone had already, had always known that), but she’s one of the first literary critics to reveal that most famous writers have been writing as men, exerting the influence of their sex (that’s to use her language) in a manner that implicitly glorifies their masculinity, implicitly glorifies all men.

    But this is not so [she writes in 1924] with Milton. There’s [and this is Woolf’s amazing argument here] a small group of writers whose work [and I’m quoting her] is pure, uncontaminated, sexless as the angels are said to be sexless and Milton is their leader [she tells us].

Like Lady Mary Chudleigh, Woolf holds up Milton as a powerful authority. He’s almost a mythological figure who can sanction, who can authorize this revolution in women’s writing that Virginia Woolf is beginning to prophesy here early in the twentieth century.

But this of course, as we know, is only one of the ways in which Milton’s power, or what Woolf thinks of as his leadership, can be thought of. In 1928, and this is the next quotation on the handout, Milton has come to represent for Virginia Woolf a very different type of cultural force. Near the conclusion of the perfectly extraordinary book A Room of One’s Own, Woolf elaborates on her prophecy of a feminist future, a world in which women can be viewed – a literary feminist future – a world in which women can be viewed as writers of no less stature and of no less power than men. So this is Woolf I am quoting:

    For my belief is [and I’ll have to skip around a little bit] that if we live another century or so and have 500 a year each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think, if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.

Now the language is intentionally and really sublimely opaque and apocalyptic here as Woolf imagines what might have happened to Judith Shakespeare had she been given the cultural opportunities of her more privileged brother, William, but the anticipated triumph of women writers can never occur, according to Virginia Woolf here, until we look past “Milton’s bogey” – until we look past “Milton’s bogey.” She’s ingeniously vague about what Milton’s bogey is. I have puzzled over this, I’ve puzzled over this phrase for years, and I’m not even remotely satisfied that I have a clue what she means: but Milton’s bogey would seem to be, I think, that frightening shadow that Milton casts over wives who might find themselves identifying with the subordinate Milton’s Eve. Milton’s bogey seems to be the specter hovering over women poets or women writers who may find in Milton an identification of poetic strength with masculinity itself.

Now Woolf doesn’t try to explain exactly how it is that Milton is shutting out the view, and she doesn’t try to explain what the view would look like if it weren’t shut out. But in citing the power of what she claims to be this Puritan bogey, Virginia Woolf really suddenly reveals, I think, how difficult it is even for her to shut out entirely the real–or it might just be the bogus–power of John Milton. At the very moment that Woolf advises women readers to look past Milton’s bogey, she finds herself in the peculiar position of echoing the poetry of John Milton. This is, I think, an unbelievable thing to have happen at one of the formative moments of twentieth-century feminism. She’s alluding here, I think, to one of the most famous passages in Paradise Lost in which Milton is asserting nothing other than his poetic power.

This is on the handout. The blind poet calls on the Holy Spirit to assist him in the composition of the epic. He asks the Heavenly Muse at the end of the passage to help him “see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight,” and Milton’s going to need this additional help from God because, as he says – this is near the middle of the passage – because “wisdom at one entrance is quite shut out.” Milton’s blindness, the fact of his blindness, has shut out his view of the visible world, which would ordinarily present itself to him through the entrance of his eyes; and this shut-out will enable him, will help him, explore the invisible world of divine truth.

Now when Virginia Woolf writes that Milton’s bogey has shut out the view of his female readers, she seems to be suggesting that the specter of Milton blinds women to the things that they should be seeing, the most important truths out there in the world. How troubling though – this seems undeniable – and how strange that Woolf really at her most radical is echoing the very words of the power that she’s opposing! It’s almost as if she were saying in some way, in a post-Miltonic world, which is the world that we all live in, it’s impossible fully to look past Milton’s bogey; that the rhetoric of power, the literary strategies of power, and in some cases the very experience of power, have become inextricably tied and indebted to Milton. And in this great prophecy of twentieth-century feminism, Woolf is essentially proposing a cultural revolution. And it’s as if the text here were telling us that whether we like it or not, whether we like Milton or not, the language of revolution is one that is forever and always indebted to that bogeyman John Milton, as Virginia Woolf had written, “Milton is our leader.”
Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan [00:32:20]

Now some of you I’m assuming will already have read Paradise Lost and so it will come to you as no surprise that the representation of power for which Milton is most celebrated is the power exhibited in the failed revolution against God, the revolution against God by Satan and his fellow rebels. My guess is that our sense of Milton’s power, however that power is imagined, is intimately related to the way in which Milton himself represents power in the characters of Satan and of God in Paradise Lost. Look at the next passage. This is from Paradise Lost. Satan and the rebel angels have been roundly defeated. They’ve been humiliated by the Son of God and the other priggish loyalist angels so they are pained, utterly humiliated. They’re prostrate on the burning lake of this miserable new realm called hell, yet nonetheless Satan pulls himself together and begins to analyze, to theorize, his situation. He describes for us his own power that somehow manages to survive even a terrifying and humiliating defeat like the one he’s just experienced. So this is Satan:

    What though the field be lost?
    All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
    And study of revenge, immortal hate,
    And courage never to submit or yield:
    And what is else not to overcome?
    That glory never shall his wrath or might
    Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
    With suppliant knee, and deify his power
    Who from the terror of this Arm so late
    Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed,
    That were an ignominy and shame beneath
    This downfall. (I.105-116)

Now we might at first think that Satan’s vaunting here is the product of nothing more elevated than hate and a desire for revenge, but Milton’s doing something truly extraordinary. I think that the imaginative achievement here in Satan’s speech is easy to miss. Satan finds it ignominious and shameful to lower himself to God, to bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee and deify His power, but this kind of submission is shameful not because it’s simply always shameful so to debase oneself. It’s an ignominy and a shame because it may very well be – I think this is without question what Satan is implying here – it may very well be that God is not actually omnipotent. Would an omnipotent, would a truly all-powerful God actually doubt the extent of His own empire? In Virginia Woolf’s terms, Satan is trying to look past God’s bogey. He tries to get behind the highly theatrical, the culturally constructed illusion of God’s power, and you can hear Satan saying, “Well, so what if we lost? We may have lost this battle, but the important thing is that God revealed a terror of this arm, of our strength. A fear of the military strength of the rebel angels is what was manifest in this war. God was so afraid of us that He actually doubted His hold on His own empire, an empire that He was only actually able to maintain because of good luck or something like superior military firepower, but certainly nothing as grand and as absolute as omnipotence.”

This is an amazing thing for Satan to say after his fall. Even the expulsion of Satan from heaven was not sufficient to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the legitimate authority of God. That Satan is still able to doubt the legitimacy of God’s power is a testimony to the complexity, I think, of the analysis of power in Paradise Lost. No power, not even God’s power, can be irresistibly and indisputably proven. Satan refuses in this speech to deify the power of the conquering enemy, and in this refusal Satan resembles no one so much as John Milton: John Milton, the political leftist who refused to deify the power of the English king Charles the First, who so many of his contemporaries considered to be God’s anointed; John Milton who wrote hundreds of pages of anti-monarchic propaganda until King Charles’s head was safely severed from his body. Like Milton, Satan is in the business of demystifying power, of exposing political or cultural power as something that is not simply inherently there or naturally there. Power is something – and this is what we learn from a reading of John Milton – power is something that is created by a human process of deification, a process of king-worship or a process of God-worship or book-worship or a process, for that matter, of poet-worship.

Now later on in Paradise Lost, Satan comes to the conclusion that that old man in heaven who had assumed the authority to issue all of those arbitrary decrees – Satan finally relents and concedes that He is actually an omnipotent God and that that God actually is, or was, the omnipotent creator of all things. But despite this enormous concession and this realization, Satan is still justified, I think, in his cynical demystification of God’s behavior before the defeat of the rebel angels. And Satan complains now that God never bothered to demonstrate to the angels just how powerful He was. And so this is the last quotation on the handout. Satan again:

    But He who reigns
    Monarch in Heav’n, till then as one secure
    Sat on his Throne, upheld by old repute,
    Consent or custom, and his Regal State
    Put forth at full, but still his strength conceal’d,
    Which tempted our attempt and wrought our fall. (I.637-642)

Satan’s saying that before the war in heaven, God’s power just seemed like any other king’s power, as if God sat on the throne of heaven merely because of those humanly constructed reasons of tradition, or of old repute or consent or custom. Now alas for Satan, it turned out that God’s monarchy was actually based on genuine strength. It wasn’t simply that God just happened to be wearing the crown and just happened to be sitting in the best chair; but in Satan’s articulation of what we can think of as a dialectic of power and authority, he provides us with a useful analysis of the problems besetting any understanding of power. The kinds of authority established by the bogeys of tradition and custom and conservative tradition are not always distinguishable from the kinds of authority that are based on genuine strength. Even if we locate a source of some kind of genuine strength, authoritative strength, it’s still usually possible, as it is for Satan, to argue that that power is really at base just the concealed product of custom or what we would think of as cultural construction. To be a king, one need merely put forth one’s regal state, one simply needs to act kingly.

Now I raise the matter of Satan’s critique of God’s power because the evaluation and the criticism of Milton, and especially of Milton’s poetry, has hinged for a couple of centuries now on a related set of questions about this poet’s power. Is Milton powerful for the very straightforward reason that he’s in possession of this tremendous literary strength, this unimaginable talent? Or has Milton only seemed powerful because of the traditional religious values with which he is so intimately associated? Does Milton only seem powerful because he has the force or the strength of the age-old literary canon behind him? Does Milton only seem powerful because he’s the very literary embodiment of patriarchy and masculine bias?

It goes without saying that these are questions that it’s impossible for us to try to answer certainly now, but Milton lets us know later in Paradise Lost that Satan was wrong to embark on his dangerous deconstruction of divine power. Milton ultimately is a pious man and wants us to frown on Satan’s critique of the Judeo-Christian conception of divinity. But regardless of Milton’s ultimate dismissal of Satan’s position, Satan’s analysis of power, and of God’s power especially, isn’t that easily dismissible. And that’s not simply because Satan bears such a strong resemblance to Milton, as, of course, he does. I’m convinced Satan looks ahead to us as well. Satan resembles us as readers as we attempt to dissect and to anatomize the power of Milton’s poetry. I would go so far to say that something like a satanic sensibility may be one of our best guides in our reading of Milton. It’s Milton’s Satan who best prepares us – I’ll throw this out here at the end of this lecture – who best prepares us to explore what we can think of as the labyrinth of Miltonic power. He puts us in a position to explore that truly weird but undeniable process whereby the very word “Milton,” the name “Milton,” stops referring to a particular middle-class Londoner who was born in 1608 and begins to embody the very essence of that strange and inexplicable phenomenon that we call literary power.

So the lecture is over. For next time, make sure that you will have read at the very least Milton’s great poem, and he wrote it when he was only twenty-one years old, “The Ode on Christ’s Nativity.” And read, of course, the other two poems that were assigned for the class. But we’ll be focusing on what we call “The Nativity Ode.” Okay, that’s it.

Cadmium-II

JUSTICE: 

The Hologram known as Rimmer — 

Guilty, of Second-Degree Murder.

One thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven counts.

RIMMER: 

No...There's some mistake, surely...

JUSTICE: 

Each count carries a statuatory penalty of eight years penal servitude.  

In the light of your hologrammatic status, these sentences are to be seved consecutively, making a total sentence of nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight years.

RIMMER: 

I've never so much as returned a library book late!

Second-degree murder?  

A thousand people?  

I would have remembered.

JUSTICE: 

Your wilful negligence in failing to reseal a drive plate resulted in the deaths of the entire crew of the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel the Red Dwarf.

RIMMER: (Pause.) 

Oh, that.

20.17


A red warning light failed to go on in the Drive Room,  beginning a chain of events which would lead, in a further twenty-three minutes, to the total annihilation of the entire crew of Red Dwarf.
 

20.18
Rimmer was released from the medical bay, and told to take twenty-four hours' sick leave. He was halfway along Corridor 5: delta 333, on his way back to his sleeping quarters, when he changed his mind and decided to spend the evening in a stasis booth.
 

The medical orderly had informed him of the Lister situation, and that just about capped a perfect day in the life of Arnold J. Rimmer. On top of everything, Lister was about to gain three years on him. By the time they got back to Earth, Lister would be exactly the same age, while he would he three years older. Even with his illicit stasis-boothing, Rimmer could only hope to snatch three months; four at best. So Lister would gain two-and-three-quarter whole years, and he was already younger than Rimmer to start with. It seemed totally unfair.
 

To cheer himself up, he decided to spend the evening in a state of non-being, and vowed to begin work in the morning on an appeal against Lister's sentence, so he could get him out of the stasis booth and make him start ageing again.
 

20.23
Navigation officer Henri DuBois knocked his black cona coffee with four sugars over his computer console keyboard. 

As he mopped up the coffee, he noticed three red warning blips on his monitor screen, which he wrongly assumed were the result of his spillage. 

20.24


Rimmer got out of the lift on the main stasis floor and made a decision which, in retrospect, he would regret forever.
He decided to comb his hair.



20.31

The Cadmium-II coolant system, located deep in the bowels of the engine corridors, stopped functioning.

20.36
Rimmer stood in the main wash-room on the stasis deck and combed his hair. He combed his hair in the usual way, then decided to see what it would look like if he parted it on the opposite side. It didn't look very good, so he combed it back again. He washed his hands and dried them on a paper towel. 

If he had left at this point and gone directly to a stasis booth, he wouldn't have died. But, instead, he was seized by one of his frequent superstition attacks.
 

He rolled the paper towel into a ball and decided if he could throw it directly into the disposal unit, he would eventually become an officer. He took careful aim, decided on an overarm shot, and tossed his paper ball.
 

It missed by eight feet.
 

He retrieved the paper and decided if he got it in the disposal unit three times on the run it would make up for the miss. 

The miss would then be struck from the superstition record, and not only would he become an officer, but within three weeks he would get to have sex with a beautiful woman.
 

Standing directly above the disposal unit, he dropped and retrieved the paper ball three times. Combing his hair one last time, he left the wash-room, idly wondering just who the beautiful girl might be, and headed for a stasis booth
 

20.40
The Cadmium-II core reached critical mass and unleashed the deadly power of a neutron bomb. 

The ship remained structurally undamaged, but in 0.08 seconds everyone on the Engineering Level was dead.
 

20.40 and 2.7 seconds.
Rimmer placed his hand on the wheel lock of stasis booth 1344. 

He heard what sounded like a nuclear wind roaring down the corridor towards him. 

It was, in fact, a nuclear wind roaring down the corridor towards him.

What now? he thought, rather irritably, and was suddenly hit full in the face by a nuclear explosion.
 

0.57 seconds before he expired, Rimmer released he was going to die. 

His life didn't flash before him. 

He didn't think of his parents, or his brothers or his home. 

He didn't think of the failed exams or the wasted time in the stasis booths. 

He didn't even think about his one, brief love affair with Yvonne McGruder, the ship's female boxing champion.
 

What he did, in fact, think of was a bowl of soup. 

A bowl of gazpacho soup.
 

Then he died.


Then everyone died.
 

TWENTY
Deep in the belly of Red Dwarf, safely sealed in the cargo hold, Frankenstein nibbled happily from a box of fish paste, while four tiny sightless kittens suckled noisily beneath her.
 

Part Two
 

Alone in a Godless universe, 

and out of Shake'n'Vac  

ONE  

The hatch to the stasis booth zuzz-zungged open, and a green 'Exit now' sign flashed on and off above Lister's head.
 

Holly's digitalised faced appeared on the eight-foot-square wall monitor.

'It is now safe for you to emerge from stasis.'


'I only just got in.'




Please proceed to the Drive Room for debriefing.' 

Holly's face melted into the smooth greyness of the blank screen.

‘But I only just got in,' insisted Lister. 

He walked down the empty corridor towards the Xpress lift. 

What was that smell? A musty smell. Like an old attic. He knew that smell. It was just like the smell of his grand- mother's cellar. He'd never noticed it before.
 

And what was that noise? A kind of hissing buzz. The air-conditioning? Why could he hear the air-conditioning? He'd never heard it before. He suddenly realized it wasn't what he was hearing that was odd, it was what he wasn't hearing. 

Apart from the white noise of the air-conditioning, there was no other sound. Just the lonely squeals of his rubber soles on the corridor floor. And there was dust everywhere. Curious mounds of white dust lying in random patterns.
 

'Where is everybody?'


Holly projected his face onto the floor in front of Lister. 

'They're dead, Dave,' he said, solemnly.

‘Who is?' asked Lister, absently.

 

Softly: 'Everybody, Dave.'

 

'What?' Lister smiled.

 

'Everybody's dead, Dave.'

 

'What? Everybody?'

 

'Yes. Everybody's dead, Dave.
'

'What? Petersen?'

 

'Yes. They're all dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.' 

'Burroughs?'
 

Holly sighed. 'Everybody is dead, Dave ' 

'Selby?'

 

'Yes.'

 

'Not Chen?'
 

'Gordon Bennet!' Holly snapped. 'Yes, Chen! Everybody. Everybody's dead, Dave.'
 

'Even the Captain?'


'YES! EVERYBODY.'
 

Lister squeaked along the corridor. A tic in his left cheek pulled his face into staccato smiles. He wanted to laugh. 

Everybody was dead. Why did he want to laugh? No, they couldn't all be dead. Not everybody. Not literally everybody.
 

'What about Rimmer?' 

 
'HE'S DEAD, DAVE. EVERYBODY IS DEAD. EVERYBODY IS DEAD, DAVE. DAVE, EVERYBODY IS DEAD.' Holly tried all four words in every possible permutation, with every possible inflection, finishing with: 'DEAD, DAVE, EVERYBODY IS, EVERYBODY IS, DAVE, DEAD.'
 

Lister looked blankly in no particular direction, while his face struggled to find an appropriate expression.

'Wait,' he said, after a while. 'Are you telling me everybody's dead?'
 

Holly rolled his eyes, and nodded.
 

The enormous Drive Room echoed with silence. The banks of computers on autopilot whirred about their business. 

'Holly,' Lister's small voice resonated in the giant chamber, 'what are these piles of dust?'
 

The dust lay on the floors, on chairs, everywhere, all arranged in small, neat dunes. Lister dipped his finger in one and tasted it.
 

'That,' said Holly from his huge screen, 'is Console Executive Imran Sanchez.' 

Lister's tongue hung guiltily from his mouth, and he wiped the white particles which had once formed part of Console Executive Imran Sanchez onto his jacket cuff. 

'So, what happened?'
 

Holly told him about the Cadmium-II radiation leak; how the crew had been wiped out within seconds; how he'd headed the ship pell-mell out of the solar system, to avoid spreading nuclear contamination; and how he'd had to keep
Lister in stasis until the radiation had reached a safe background level.
 

'So . . . How long did you keep me in stasis?'



'Three million years,' said Holly, as casually as he could. 

Lister acted as if he hadn't heard. 

Three million years? It had no meaning. 

If it had been thirty years, he would have thought 'What a long time.' 

But three million years. 

Three million years was just . . . stupid.