Top of the batting order (I love a good sports metaphor): well, I knew a while ago what I was thinking! Ah, I was thinking how good to have John Milton's Paradise Lost in my mind still, because the works I read now do not stick. Frustrating! I could pick up PL and open it to any book and know where I was and what the story was doing. Moreover, to have PL in my mind means I can think toward understanding the Idea of it, that which Milton saw or discovered when he wrote the poem and which is inherent in every line of it, beginning to end. At Berea College the Administration or English department got rid of the Milton course once I retired. Though the work stands at a crucial juncture in the history of western civilization (c. 1660), though PL recounts a fundamental story of our civilization's mythic origins in the Garden of Eden, though it contains beautiful, stirring lines of iambic pentameter poetry, its beauty is not really useful in a utilitarian, tech degree oriented (STEM), secular culture.
Today, reading the journal First Things, I came upon a description of "liberal learning" that stands firmly opposed to the current notions of higher education as "skills training": "Liberal learning is out of step with our times because it offers us not vocational skills but the shaping of habits of thought and practice. It forms our souls through exposure to beauty, to truth, and to the power of the sublime that we can only glimpse through the mediation of rare artistic genius." (Yuval Levin, FT, October 2014, 25-31). That was the clean-up batter who also reminded me of Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and, of course, Dante's Divine Comedy, all works of "rare artistic genius," and delightful to own (metaphor).
Illustration by William Blake.