All Dogs Go to Paradise

"Many years ago when an adored dog died, a great friend, a bishop, said to me, "You must always remember that, as far as the Bible is concerned, God only threw the humans out of Paradise." -Unknown

It is certainly interesting that Wordsworth's hermetic hero describes himself in his youthful days as a labrador, because it certainly brings up a lot of interesting connotations. Joyous, simple, laughing, happy, and overall content with his lot in life. Wordsworth is naturally going for these words because it'll make all the more sense when he is knocked out of his labrador phase and into consciousness. Life, pain, but moreover the prescence of God's reality in his life awakens him to a new form of awareness where he ultimately realizes it is better to live not in constant joy and bliss, like a dog, nor is it better to constantly be weighed down by the burdens of life. No, the best thing is a combination of the two, where he is rooted in reality and pragmaticism but has joy akin to that of a puppy dog, all tied intogether with the knowledge of God's truth.

That's not good enough for me, though, because if Wordsworth wants to compare himself to a puppy dog, I'd like to compare the whole thing to Paradise Lost. The story goes that Adam and Eve were perfectly happy and blissful in Paradise, until they sinned and were banished from the Garden into the wilderness. The problem is, instead of finding truth, they actually ruin truth forever by staining it with sin. Instead of living in a true awareness of who they are and who God made them to be, they destroy the beauty God had planned and stain their lives and the rest of the world with evil. What was once a complete, logical world becomes completely wrong and illogical, and the rest is history.

Of course, and we discussed this in class last year, just because Adam and Eve were living in Paradise in complete innocence does mean they were nothing but mindless labradors. They lived in full consciousness of who they were, the order of the world, and knowledge of the prescence of God. Sinning simply meant that confusion entered their lives and they lost sight of who they were meant to be. Wordsworth, however, states it was after the fall of innocence that he gained true recognition of himself, so who is right? Who can truly say? I just find it interesting that two seemingly unrelated writers could parallel, yet opposite ground, and it all has to do with labradors!

Anyway, that's my blog, feel free to comment with praise or poison, either works. Thanks for reading! BTW, my blog post is on Bethan Morgan's Kubla Kahn's Kibbles and bits.

I can see what you mean by the woman's impassioned longing for what is essentially Satanic. Things suddenly get really dark, really quick, and I can almost see a gothic, vampiric scene taking place. No, not Twilight, but more like Dracula in that the woman has an intense lust for her temptation that she should be avoiding, but embraces it anyway and loses herself in it. The big kicker, though, is that it's not an ordinary force of nature but a man-made disaster like a dirty bomb or a dam demolishing, which only makes it all the more evil. Good observation!