The Classics Still Ring True

“Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straitforward pathway had been lost.”

-opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Longfellow’s translation)

At the outset of the Divine Comedy careful readers are presented with questions. Where did this story start? How did he get off the strait pathway? Did he not realize he was entering a creepy forest? Dante teases our curiosity by beginning in medias res…in the middle of things. We take up the thread of the Comedy when Dante is in the middle of his life, in the middle of a forest, in the middle of great fear because he is in the middle of being woefully lost. But he never says how he got there.

How much like your life is that? Have you ever woken up, taken in your surroundings and asked, “How in blue heaven did I get here?” Yeah, me too. Once I was a great athlete (relatively great). Now the few stairs leading into the county courthouse wind me badly. Once I was full of an easy joy and optimism about all things. But after losing loved ones to death and friends to rejection, despair seems to be the only easy condition for me to fall into. My birthday cakes used to have a few candles. Now it doesn’t have any because there isn’t enough room for them all …and the light they would give off would scare small children. One time we lived in a country where people loved freedom and truth and virtue and conversations and neighbors … we used to see people smile at each other. Now we are all masked literally and metaphorically. I look around today and ask where in the cotton pick am I and how did I get here? And I know, dear reader, that you know exactly what I’m talking about. So did Dante.

Which is why we need the Classics so badly. We don’t read the classics to impress guests at a dinner party. We read them because we need them. We need them because our souls are lost without them. Dante’s despair and lostness are like those old well-worn blue jeans that fit you down to the soul. They may not look wonderful but they are familiar. He … is … we. It is said that misery loves company. Dante opens the story in a state of deep loneliness because he knew that he was not alone in his loneliness. He means us to feel the weight of human solitarity (I may have just made up a word…but, as the dolphin said, that was on porpoise). But he doesn’t stay in the forest nor does he leave us there. Oh, how glad you should be to hear that a guide came to him…and will come to you! Nobody can appreciate a guide until they know how lost and hopeless they are. Dante doesn’t even treasure his guide until harassed by a trio of ferocious beasts that bar his way. He is lost but tries to get found by himself. Heaven says otherwise. We cannot save ourselves and shouldn’t try. We need a Savior. Surprisingly for Dante, it will be Virgil, who sang of Aeneas, the fall of Troy and the foundation of Rome, that will come to the rescue and lead him through the inferno. And Virgil was sent to Dante by heaven. Don’t miss this: Dante’s savior was a Classic author. A Classic book. And Dante in turn means to be our heavenly Guide through the forest of life we are lost in. We are lost because we have lost the classics.

The truth is that we are all in a pre-mid-post life crisis of lostness and loneliness. We will all walk that same terrifying forest. We will all want to escape our loneliness by our own bootstraps, ascending the mount delectable…only to find ourselves thrust back down. Dante needed a guide. So do I. And so do you. Anybody up for a summer of Dante?

Will Martin lives in La Grange