Midway in the journey of our life

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost. (Inf. I, 1-3)

I awoke a couple of weeks ago to find myself suffocating in the gnarled, overbearing weight of a hauntingly familiar wood. Growing up as a child and through my adolescence, I heard stories of this wood from those who had emerged, and desperate prayers were sent up for those unfortunate others who had not yet found their way. It has been nearly ten days...

Whether by happy mistake or by providence, I had set myself to cleaning out an old bookcase when I found a well-worn copy of Dante Alighieri's The Inferno. I had read the Commedia years ago for a course in the study of "great books", works heralded by thousands of scholars and millions of less-erudite readers as the greatest literary works of their respective times and our own. The motivating idea behind the Commedia is almost outrageous in its simplicity: haunted by ignorance, fear, and cowardice, moral compass askew, Dante begins on earth in fear and trembling to end, one hundred Cantos later, with a joyous and rapturous vision of the Trinitarian God.

The opening lines of his first Canto invite us to join him:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...
Midway in the journey of our life...

This is a story for the appetitive human soul, the "everyman". Me.

Too long have I been full of sleep. Like Dante, I do not even know how I have come to this place or when I forsook the one true way. When I awoke, sleep called me gently to once more lose my intellect and my will to its lull. Never again. Though strains of sleep dull my senses, I hear God's beckoning call above all else. As St. Augustine put down in his Confessions, "You have made us toward You, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You". My restlessness has come to bear upon me in full strength, forced into a desperate deluge by nearly a year of suppression under sleep and sin.

I now turn to the Commedia with new eyes. No longer are Beatrice, Virgil, Dante, Francesca and others to be mere literary tools, allegories for faith, human reason, the soul, and lust. There is something to the Commedia beyond this, an invitation to look and see for ourselves. Yes, one can find the historical/literal, the allegorical, the moral, and ultimately seek to find the anagogical in the Commedia, but this time around, I desire the experience, Dante's experience on the full scales of human emotion and reason.

Everyone reads their own Commedia. Let's dialogue. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost. (Inf. I, 1-3)

I awoke a couple of weeks ago to find myself suffocating in the gnarled, overbearing weight of a hauntingly familiar wood. Growing up as a child and through my adolescence, I heard stories of this wood from those who had emerged, and desperate prayers were sent up for those unfortunate others who had not yet found their way. It has been nearly ten days...

Whether by happy mistake or by providence, I had set myself to cleaning out an old bookcase when I found a well-worn copy of Dante Alighieri's The Inferno. I had read the Commedia years ago for a course in the study of "great books", works heralded by thousands of scholars and millions of less-erudite readers as the greatest literary works of their respective times and our own. The motivating idea behind the Commedia is almost outrageous in its simplicity: haunted by ignorance, fear, and cowardice, moral compass askew, Dante begins on earth in fear and trembling to end, one hundred Cantos later, with a joyous and rapturous vision of the Trinitarian God.

The opening lines of his first Canto invite us to join him:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...
Midway in the journey of our life...

This is a story for the appetitive human soul, the "everyman". Me.

Too long have I been full of sleep. Like Dante, I do not even know how I have come to this place or when I forsook the one true way. When I awoke, sleep called me gently to once more lose my intellect and my will to its lull. Never again. Though strains of sleep dull my senses, I hear God's beckoning call above all else. As St. Augustine put down in his Confessions, "You have made us toward You, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You". My restlessness has come to bear upon me in full strength, forced into a desperate deluge by nearly a year of suppression under sleep and sin.

I now turn to the Commedia with new eyes. No longer are Beatrice, Virgil, Dante, Francesca and others to be mere literary tools, allegories for faith, human reason, the soul, and lust. There is something to the Commedia beyond this, an invitation to look and see for ourselves. Yes, one can find the historical/literal, the allegorical, the moral, and ultimately seek to find the anagogical in the Commedia, but this time around, I desire the experience, Dante's experience on the full scales of human emotion and reason.

Everyone reads their own Commedia. Let's dialogue.