This Pendent World is a phrase taken from the poem Paradise Lost by John Milton:
And fast by hanging in a golden chain This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Satan the fallen angel, having rebelled against God, has been flung out of Heaven, through the empty Night of Chaos, and into the mire of Hell. He then picks himself up and ponders his next move against the Almighty, whose omnipotent rule he finds insufferably tedious. Rather than risk another frontal assault on Heaven, “Whose high walls fear neither assault or siege,” Satan hatches a plan to enact revenge upon the Almighty by corrupting His favored creation, Man. Gazing through space, Satan espies the newly created Earth hanging by a chain from Heaven, “the happy seat of some new race called Man,”
And:
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.
“But what does that have to do with your blog,” asks my son Noah.
Well nothing perhaps, beyond that I love the image of the earth pendent in space, physically and metaphorically derived from heaven, and also pendent in form, amorphous and unfinished.
“Even so, everyone will think it is a jewelry site,” says Noah.
He may be right. He’s referring to pendant the noun meaning most often jewelry or other down-hanging ornament. I am referring to pendent the adjective, meaning suspended or supported from above, but also undetermined, yet to be decided, filled with possibility.
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