Of wonderful opening lines, one cannot bypass The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.”
I love the question, "What does it really mean to be lost?" Imagine Dante and Heidegger together on one of the latter's country path walks. What a discussion they would have!
The "knowing where I want to go but not recognizing where I am" reminds me of Heidegger's discussions on the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein. The Das Man (every man) knows not where he is. However, his inauthenticity is in the fact that he is unaware that he does not know where he is - "not recognizing that I do not recognize where I am" - as he flows in the stream of life with the "they."
Obtaining the insight to even ask, "What does it really mean to be lost?" is perhaps the first gift. Waking up in the middle of life washed on the shore of the stream of life at the edge of a dark forest might be the most effective way to motivate us. By then, we have a mature past, an expectant future, and a present that demands our resolve. These are the ingredients required to "see" the question, "What does it really mean to be lost?" in the first place.
A Dante-Heidegger philosophy mashup, now there's an intriguing suggestion! 😄 I probably did have Heidegger in mind when I was writing about "authenticity." I'm not surprised that you picked it up Walter! What's great about Heidegger is that he shows us that on the flip side of "being existentially lost" is the possibility of re-location, of discovering our "Being-in-the-World" as a gift of abundant promise!
Of course Dante (the pilgrim) doesn’t initially know he’s embarking on a “journey whose ultimate destination is heaven.” Virgil (Beatrice’s emissary) tells him he will guide him — to the limits of his “pagan” license — on a course that ultimately leads to the “the gateway of Saint Peter.”
I think rather than the tale starting “at its apex,” it is, for Dante, starting at its nadir. His purpose has been ”dismantled;” his earthly “goals” have been denied. He can’t go back, but is decidedly anxious about the future (“But why should I go there? Who sanctions it? For I am not Aeneas, am not Paul...”)
Your reference to the poem “Aristotle” is apt — I don’t think Dante’s making a temporal statement as much as he is evoking Aristotle’s conception of time as “a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time.” Scholars point out that Dante was familiar with Aristotle’s characterization. Columbia’s “Digital Dante” commentary on Canto 1 notes: “When Dante begins the Commedia “Nel mezzo”, it is hard not to think of Aristotle’s definition of time as “a kind of middle-point” and to feel that the poet is alerting us to our existential being in time, also intrinsic to the opening metaphor of life as a path. As humans, we are ineluctably tethered to “number of motion, according to before and after”—to time.”
Perhaps Robert Frost was echoing Dante’s difficult “Dark Wood” choices when he said: ““In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
Corey, that was beautifully said! And you also jumped straight to the punchline when you noted that Dante's "apex" is actually his nadir. We'll see those inversions (or contrarieties) everywhere in his work: center/circumference, outside/inside, up/down, physical/spiritual. Once we begin to see both properties at the same time, or are able to hold them in our mind together, we're on our way to thinking like Dante!
As an artist I understand the use or need for a muse so I see his need to create the myth for himself of unrequited love to release his emotional side early on to explore his art of writing. When she died at 24 and he had started his family I think he threw himself into his work and responsibilities not allowing himself to be disillusioned by society. At the midlife crisis point we are all left with the decision of a course correction sometimes this correction is traumatic as in Dante’s case. The longing that he wrestled with the rest of his life did give us one of the world’s greatest epic poems so we are lucky. It’s a bit like when Michelangelo saw Tomasso at his mid life and even though it didn’t disrupt his life quite like Dante’s the great art that flowed from his souls turmoil
was a blessing to us all.
We are living longer these days so I believe there’s room for a third phase of life. I like the Japanese point of view that there is a young old age from 65 to 75 which allows for an assessment of your health and skills for your final stand.
Thank you for those reflections, Jack. As an artist, you must be familiar with that process whereby you can assimilate grief, disappointment, or even the challenges of aging into your creative vision, penetrating the mysteries of reality at even deeper level. I'm with you 100% on having a fruitful "third phase of life"! I hope yours will be rich and rewarding. :)
I am considering only the first 30 lines of Canto 1. Sorry for the length, but I really love Dante. I could write about him for hours.
Dante starts this first Canto describing a profound personal crisis: “la verace via abbandonai”. As I personally see it, he may have had a real encounter with Jesus that has radically changed his heart and he is describing this change in highly spiritually charged poetry.
In any case, he is describing from the point of view of one that has overcome that experience. It sounds as a testimony, as in St. Paul or St. Augustine, from the point of view of someone that could not see and now can see.
WHY NOT? Inspiration for a book can come from any sort of experience, but here the Poet seems to openly indicate in the two introductory cantos that it came from a divine source. As Singleton suggests, I want to “believe” in the fiction.
This seems to me also corroborated by:
1) the surprising change of goal in his interests, from becoming famous writing about Beatrice in the Dolce Stil Nuovo poetry, to “…remove those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of happiness”, as he tells to his patron, Cangrande Della Scala.
2) the use of the word “true” to define the way he abandoned. The “true Way” is only one in medieval time, it’s Jesus.
3) “the pass that never has let any man survive” can be death or entering in a different dimension from that we all live in, like Paul to the third heaven.
This introductory walk in the forest, out of the dangerous water of the “pelago” into a beach and up some steps toward a place inhabited by aggressive animals, seems to indicate subsequent stages toward that new goal, which soon will be revealed by Virgil.
For now, I read a lot of fear, strong contrasts of dark and light, uncertainty, wrong steps and wrong thoughts, and the profound desire to “get out of it”. This is what I personally experienced before meeting God, especially in the last year before entering the Church: everything was going wrong and I did not know how to find the “true Way”.
The description of his feelings is stunning in these first lines. I see realistic images charged with meaning beyond reality:
1)THE DARK FOREST tells us that Dante has reached a point in life where he is blinded by what surrounds him. What surrounds him? The death of Beatrice, the awareness of the corruption of politic and the failure of his political program, the exile, the death penalty in absentia, the struggle with his poets’ friends and with his family… all these and more are trees/obstacles that impede the light of truth, metaphorically speaking, to reach his heart, that is, he is asleep, he is blind, he cannot see the right path.
He is stocked in an uncomfortable and dangerous place and he does not see any way out of this situation, despite he sees the light on the mountain shoulder that gives him some sort of hope. And this hope is what allow him to open his heart to receive the grace to go to this journey and really be changed and saved.
2) THE LIGHT is an essential element in the comedy and in the medieval mentality. All the medieval churches built in gothic style represent a radical innovation in respect to the previous Romanesque style, brought forward to obtain the possibility to create enormous windows to bring the light, colored by special glass, inside the building.
Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis Abbey in France (around the 12th century) was the first to have the idea of using the light as a central element in Gothic architecture. He believed that the light was a manifestation of God and could elevate the human spirit and connect it with the divine realm. His point was to create a space where the light, symbolizing the divine, played a crucial role in the spiritual experience of worshipers. And still today, the darkness meeting the light in the gothic cathedrals is what makes them so appealing to our souls desperate for hope.
Dante’s poem is often called a written gothic cathedral, because of the complicated plot, the ornated beauty of the poetry, but also for the omnipresence of the medieval concept of light, surprisingly filling his words and images.
3)THE PILGRIM LANDING AFTER A SHIPWRECK, not so apparent as the dark forest. It reminds us of biblical passages as in Genesis 1, when the Holy Spirit calms the chaos or, as in the Gospel, during the storms on the boat of the Apostles, when Jesus calms the waters.
Both are dangerous moments that are not under the control of reason, but can be controlled by the power of God. Moments when the only possibility is to surrender, ask for help to God.
Dante, having shipwrecked, indicates that he drifted off shore away from God. Nevertheless, his coming out of the water to the beach, reminds us that every baptized Christian is protected by the Holy Water of Baptism and there is always hope to reconnect with the Lord.
4) HIS LEFT FOOT IS LIMPING, perhaps like in Aristoteles, his will is weak and still full of fear. Can we come to a radical change in life without doubts and stress and fear?
5) BUT MY MOST IMPORTANT IMPRESSION IN THE FIRST LINES IS ABOUT HIS SLOW SLIDING DOWN, EVEN WHEN HE IS CLIMBING OFF THE SHORE. It seems almost an impossibility for him to climb, not only the far away mountain, but, in general, he has an impediment to go toward the height, a difficulty even to move steps away from the beach, that subtly introduces and anticipate in the mind of the reader the DESCENT IN HELL. AS IF THERE IS NO CHOICE: TO GO UP, WE MUST GO DOWN!
Corroborated by the fact that Dante also underlines that he is “full of slumber”. He lacks attention when he is sliding down toward the bottom of the forest. HE IS NOT AWARE; HE IS NOT COMPLETELY AWAKE.
St. Augustine wrote that we need to descend, to ascend to God. To descend in Hell means to become AWARE of what sins are and AWAKE to our need of help. As we will see later in the canto, the DESCENT in hell is anticipated and prepared by the humiliating and fearful failure to overcome the beasts that attack him.
Therefore, immediately at the start of the poem, THE AUTHOR IS INDICATING THE TRUE PATH TO HEAVEN: first of all, we must see the sins in our souls, that is Inferno. WE MUST BECOME AWARE OF THE EVIL IN US!
6) A METAPHISICAL INTERPRETATION
Finally, in itself, the descent in hell, is actually a physical ascent to heaven. If you look at a map of Dante’s trip, you may notice that going down in Inferno, brings him closer to the mount of Purgatorio and we will realize it from a geographical point of view, EXACTLY when he will be in the tunnel before climbing out “a riveder le stelle”. We could also read his “spiritual ascent” in his change of behavior during the infernal path.
In these first lines, we already have a hint of the fact that every image that seems to be realistic is pointing to something that is beyond material reality. The Poet is immediately introducing the Readers to the necessity to read this poem in a way that does not stop at a literal, historic, moral reading, but immediately pushes us toward a deeper reflection that involves a metaphysical interpretation.
This is a summary of my taken of the first lines which I consider fundamental to understand the poem, together with the first 5 cantos. Only when I was taught to meditate on these first part of the Comedia, I was able to enter deeply and see more clearly in the rest of the journey.
I recently returned from doing a three month residency in the Tuscan hills outside Florence. Visiting Dante’s house was one of the last things I did to cap off my exploration of that great city Beatrice’s tomb at her family chapel is just around the corner he first saw her at nine and fell in love. I have a hard time believing the myth that he only saw her twice as she prayed twice daily there and from his house there is a small place where people would d gather at the well.
Jack, that trip sounds incredible! I'm like you, I find it difficult to imagine Dante keeping the flame of his love for Beatrice alive with only 2 meetings, 9 years apart. But what I think that legend glosses over is the fact that he loved her from a distance, as he writes in various places in the Vita Nuova and Convivio. So while he only mentions the two face to face encounters, he would have had other opportunities to see her (at mass, for example) and probably pine after her in the manner of the courtly love tradition, which was still around then.
Yes I see that…also the fact that he was a true artist and that crossover from real life to fiction gets blurred … I’ve gotten into many arguments about Shantaram being an autobiography…or witness the recent revelations about Cormac McCarthys muse..the thing I like about Dante is the recognition that life is a voyage and that if we aren’t struggling to break the chains of violence envy hatred and revenge to find beauty in the collective and personal responsibility to create Eden then we/you are lost…
…alas we live in a time where that pursuit seems impossible given our current politics..but I digress…
I think I am in a dark forest. I brought matches, though.
Of wonderful opening lines, one cannot bypass The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.”
💯 Oh my goodness, I quote that one to my husband all the time! 😄
I love the question, "What does it really mean to be lost?" Imagine Dante and Heidegger together on one of the latter's country path walks. What a discussion they would have!
The "knowing where I want to go but not recognizing where I am" reminds me of Heidegger's discussions on the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein. The Das Man (every man) knows not where he is. However, his inauthenticity is in the fact that he is unaware that he does not know where he is - "not recognizing that I do not recognize where I am" - as he flows in the stream of life with the "they."
Obtaining the insight to even ask, "What does it really mean to be lost?" is perhaps the first gift. Waking up in the middle of life washed on the shore of the stream of life at the edge of a dark forest might be the most effective way to motivate us. By then, we have a mature past, an expectant future, and a present that demands our resolve. These are the ingredients required to "see" the question, "What does it really mean to be lost?" in the first place.
A Dante-Heidegger philosophy mashup, now there's an intriguing suggestion! 😄 I probably did have Heidegger in mind when I was writing about "authenticity." I'm not surprised that you picked it up Walter! What's great about Heidegger is that he shows us that on the flip side of "being existentially lost" is the possibility of re-location, of discovering our "Being-in-the-World" as a gift of abundant promise!
Of course Dante (the pilgrim) doesn’t initially know he’s embarking on a “journey whose ultimate destination is heaven.” Virgil (Beatrice’s emissary) tells him he will guide him — to the limits of his “pagan” license — on a course that ultimately leads to the “the gateway of Saint Peter.”
I think rather than the tale starting “at its apex,” it is, for Dante, starting at its nadir. His purpose has been ”dismantled;” his earthly “goals” have been denied. He can’t go back, but is decidedly anxious about the future (“But why should I go there? Who sanctions it? For I am not Aeneas, am not Paul...”)
Your reference to the poem “Aristotle” is apt — I don’t think Dante’s making a temporal statement as much as he is evoking Aristotle’s conception of time as “a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time.” Scholars point out that Dante was familiar with Aristotle’s characterization. Columbia’s “Digital Dante” commentary on Canto 1 notes: “When Dante begins the Commedia “Nel mezzo”, it is hard not to think of Aristotle’s definition of time as “a kind of middle-point” and to feel that the poet is alerting us to our existential being in time, also intrinsic to the opening metaphor of life as a path. As humans, we are ineluctably tethered to “number of motion, according to before and after”—to time.”
Perhaps Robert Frost was echoing Dante’s difficult “Dark Wood” choices when he said: ““In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
Corey, that was beautifully said! And you also jumped straight to the punchline when you noted that Dante's "apex" is actually his nadir. We'll see those inversions (or contrarieties) everywhere in his work: center/circumference, outside/inside, up/down, physical/spiritual. Once we begin to see both properties at the same time, or are able to hold them in our mind together, we're on our way to thinking like Dante!
As an artist I understand the use or need for a muse so I see his need to create the myth for himself of unrequited love to release his emotional side early on to explore his art of writing. When she died at 24 and he had started his family I think he threw himself into his work and responsibilities not allowing himself to be disillusioned by society. At the midlife crisis point we are all left with the decision of a course correction sometimes this correction is traumatic as in Dante’s case. The longing that he wrestled with the rest of his life did give us one of the world’s greatest epic poems so we are lucky. It’s a bit like when Michelangelo saw Tomasso at his mid life and even though it didn’t disrupt his life quite like Dante’s the great art that flowed from his souls turmoil
was a blessing to us all.
We are living longer these days so I believe there’s room for a third phase of life. I like the Japanese point of view that there is a young old age from 65 to 75 which allows for an assessment of your health and skills for your final stand.
Thanks I enjoy your writings…and musings.
Thank you for those reflections, Jack. As an artist, you must be familiar with that process whereby you can assimilate grief, disappointment, or even the challenges of aging into your creative vision, penetrating the mysteries of reality at even deeper level. I'm with you 100% on having a fruitful "third phase of life"! I hope yours will be rich and rewarding. :)
Oh please be careful with those. Here in California, we don’t joke about forest fires! 🔥 😉
I am considering only the first 30 lines of Canto 1. Sorry for the length, but I really love Dante. I could write about him for hours.
Dante starts this first Canto describing a profound personal crisis: “la verace via abbandonai”. As I personally see it, he may have had a real encounter with Jesus that has radically changed his heart and he is describing this change in highly spiritually charged poetry.
In any case, he is describing from the point of view of one that has overcome that experience. It sounds as a testimony, as in St. Paul or St. Augustine, from the point of view of someone that could not see and now can see.
WHY NOT? Inspiration for a book can come from any sort of experience, but here the Poet seems to openly indicate in the two introductory cantos that it came from a divine source. As Singleton suggests, I want to “believe” in the fiction.
This seems to me also corroborated by:
1) the surprising change of goal in his interests, from becoming famous writing about Beatrice in the Dolce Stil Nuovo poetry, to “…remove those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of happiness”, as he tells to his patron, Cangrande Della Scala.
2) the use of the word “true” to define the way he abandoned. The “true Way” is only one in medieval time, it’s Jesus.
3) “the pass that never has let any man survive” can be death or entering in a different dimension from that we all live in, like Paul to the third heaven.
This introductory walk in the forest, out of the dangerous water of the “pelago” into a beach and up some steps toward a place inhabited by aggressive animals, seems to indicate subsequent stages toward that new goal, which soon will be revealed by Virgil.
For now, I read a lot of fear, strong contrasts of dark and light, uncertainty, wrong steps and wrong thoughts, and the profound desire to “get out of it”. This is what I personally experienced before meeting God, especially in the last year before entering the Church: everything was going wrong and I did not know how to find the “true Way”.
The description of his feelings is stunning in these first lines. I see realistic images charged with meaning beyond reality:
1)THE DARK FOREST tells us that Dante has reached a point in life where he is blinded by what surrounds him. What surrounds him? The death of Beatrice, the awareness of the corruption of politic and the failure of his political program, the exile, the death penalty in absentia, the struggle with his poets’ friends and with his family… all these and more are trees/obstacles that impede the light of truth, metaphorically speaking, to reach his heart, that is, he is asleep, he is blind, he cannot see the right path.
He is stocked in an uncomfortable and dangerous place and he does not see any way out of this situation, despite he sees the light on the mountain shoulder that gives him some sort of hope. And this hope is what allow him to open his heart to receive the grace to go to this journey and really be changed and saved.
2) THE LIGHT is an essential element in the comedy and in the medieval mentality. All the medieval churches built in gothic style represent a radical innovation in respect to the previous Romanesque style, brought forward to obtain the possibility to create enormous windows to bring the light, colored by special glass, inside the building.
Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis Abbey in France (around the 12th century) was the first to have the idea of using the light as a central element in Gothic architecture. He believed that the light was a manifestation of God and could elevate the human spirit and connect it with the divine realm. His point was to create a space where the light, symbolizing the divine, played a crucial role in the spiritual experience of worshipers. And still today, the darkness meeting the light in the gothic cathedrals is what makes them so appealing to our souls desperate for hope.
Dante’s poem is often called a written gothic cathedral, because of the complicated plot, the ornated beauty of the poetry, but also for the omnipresence of the medieval concept of light, surprisingly filling his words and images.
3)THE PILGRIM LANDING AFTER A SHIPWRECK, not so apparent as the dark forest. It reminds us of biblical passages as in Genesis 1, when the Holy Spirit calms the chaos or, as in the Gospel, during the storms on the boat of the Apostles, when Jesus calms the waters.
Both are dangerous moments that are not under the control of reason, but can be controlled by the power of God. Moments when the only possibility is to surrender, ask for help to God.
Dante, having shipwrecked, indicates that he drifted off shore away from God. Nevertheless, his coming out of the water to the beach, reminds us that every baptized Christian is protected by the Holy Water of Baptism and there is always hope to reconnect with the Lord.
4) HIS LEFT FOOT IS LIMPING, perhaps like in Aristoteles, his will is weak and still full of fear. Can we come to a radical change in life without doubts and stress and fear?
5) BUT MY MOST IMPORTANT IMPRESSION IN THE FIRST LINES IS ABOUT HIS SLOW SLIDING DOWN, EVEN WHEN HE IS CLIMBING OFF THE SHORE. It seems almost an impossibility for him to climb, not only the far away mountain, but, in general, he has an impediment to go toward the height, a difficulty even to move steps away from the beach, that subtly introduces and anticipate in the mind of the reader the DESCENT IN HELL. AS IF THERE IS NO CHOICE: TO GO UP, WE MUST GO DOWN!
Corroborated by the fact that Dante also underlines that he is “full of slumber”. He lacks attention when he is sliding down toward the bottom of the forest. HE IS NOT AWARE; HE IS NOT COMPLETELY AWAKE.
St. Augustine wrote that we need to descend, to ascend to God. To descend in Hell means to become AWARE of what sins are and AWAKE to our need of help. As we will see later in the canto, the DESCENT in hell is anticipated and prepared by the humiliating and fearful failure to overcome the beasts that attack him.
Therefore, immediately at the start of the poem, THE AUTHOR IS INDICATING THE TRUE PATH TO HEAVEN: first of all, we must see the sins in our souls, that is Inferno. WE MUST BECOME AWARE OF THE EVIL IN US!
6) A METAPHISICAL INTERPRETATION
Finally, in itself, the descent in hell, is actually a physical ascent to heaven. If you look at a map of Dante’s trip, you may notice that going down in Inferno, brings him closer to the mount of Purgatorio and we will realize it from a geographical point of view, EXACTLY when he will be in the tunnel before climbing out “a riveder le stelle”. We could also read his “spiritual ascent” in his change of behavior during the infernal path.
In these first lines, we already have a hint of the fact that every image that seems to be realistic is pointing to something that is beyond material reality. The Poet is immediately introducing the Readers to the necessity to read this poem in a way that does not stop at a literal, historic, moral reading, but immediately pushes us toward a deeper reflection that involves a metaphysical interpretation.
This is a summary of my taken of the first lines which I consider fundamental to understand the poem, together with the first 5 cantos. Only when I was taught to meditate on these first part of the Comedia, I was able to enter deeply and see more clearly in the rest of the journey.
I recently returned from doing a three month residency in the Tuscan hills outside Florence. Visiting Dante’s house was one of the last things I did to cap off my exploration of that great city Beatrice’s tomb at her family chapel is just around the corner he first saw her at nine and fell in love. I have a hard time believing the myth that he only saw her twice as she prayed twice daily there and from his house there is a small place where people would d gather at the well.
Jack, that trip sounds incredible! I'm like you, I find it difficult to imagine Dante keeping the flame of his love for Beatrice alive with only 2 meetings, 9 years apart. But what I think that legend glosses over is the fact that he loved her from a distance, as he writes in various places in the Vita Nuova and Convivio. So while he only mentions the two face to face encounters, he would have had other opportunities to see her (at mass, for example) and probably pine after her in the manner of the courtly love tradition, which was still around then.
Yes I see that…also the fact that he was a true artist and that crossover from real life to fiction gets blurred … I’ve gotten into many arguments about Shantaram being an autobiography…or witness the recent revelations about Cormac McCarthys muse..the thing I like about Dante is the recognition that life is a voyage and that if we aren’t struggling to break the chains of violence envy hatred and revenge to find beauty in the collective and personal responsibility to create Eden then we/you are lost…
…alas we live in a time where that pursuit seems impossible given our current politics..but I digress…