Yesterday was so-called Super Tuesday. As the readership of this blog is international, I might explain that the portentous adjective “Super” is used to designate the day on which numerous states hold their “primary” elections, those designed to arrive at a single party candidate to run in the general election in November. I have to admit I have gotten caught up in the political excitement and was prepared to stay up late to learn the news. This may not sound to you like a dramatic evidence of deep political commitment, but as I am definitely a Morning Person with a vengeance, it really is. However two factors worked in my favor. Most of the voting was being done in my own time zone, so that the voting day was done about the same time as my energy was depleted. Secondly, we have advanced beyond the Bad Old Days of the “hanging chads”. The technology of the voting machines now reliably yields almost instantaneous results, so that I knew all I needed to know before falling into a deep and restful sleep.
What made yesterday “super” for me
had nothing to do with the voting or its results. What made the day “super” for me was the
first meeting of a six-week course I am offering on Dante’s Inferno.
The venue for this seminar is the Evergreen Forum of Princeton, one of
the hundreds of Geezer Colleges that now dot the landscape of the American
Senior Community. I have written about
“adult” or “continuing” education on this blog before. I regard its vitality an impressive sign of
social and cultural health. On a day on
which various pundits were predicting the results of Super Tuesday in terms of
the frustrations of embittered old white people, I was standing up in front of
a class of mainly old white people full of cheerful intelligence, eager expectation, and
the thrill of discovery.
I asked for a show of hands. “How many of you will be reading Dante for
the first time?” At least a third of the
students—there are in perfect harmony with Dante’s own numerological aesthetics
thirty-three of them—raised a hand. I
actually felt a pang of jealousy. The
cruel fact is that you can read a great work of literature for the first time
only once. And while older students are often at first a
little timid and diffident, uncertain of intellectual and spiritual capacities dormant
since their college days, they have a huge if unrecognized advantage as readers
of serious books. That advantage—our advantage—is a cumulative life
experience for which there is no artificial substitute.
I am amused by our common use of
the word adult in such phrases as
“adult themes” or “adult movies,” usually signifying sexual content dealt with
at an adolescent level. If you want
adult themes, let me recommend the Divine
Comedy. Its subject, according to
its author, is “the state of the souls after death”. It deals with the traditional four Last
Things of Catholic theology: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.
Centennial years always command a
special attention. The year 1300 perhaps
held more than most. The pope had
declared it a special year and offered special inducements to attract pilgrims
to Rome. They came in large
numbers. Dante’s poem, written a few
years later, uses the Jubilee of 1300 as its historical setting, so that the
journey of the poet-narrator has a universal symbolic suggestion as well as an
intensely personal focus. The famous
opening lines of the Inferno begin
thus: “Midway in the journey of our
life, I came to myself in a dark wood…”
The interplay of a shared plurality (our
life) with the singularity of a first-person narrator invites, perhaps
requires, that readers find their own journeys within the fantastic description
of the pilgrim’s.
As is typical of this poet, what he
means by midway is both personal and
universal. Life’s journey is something
of a cliché and already was when Dante first picked up his pen: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita... But there is more. Suppose that an author happened in fact to
have been born in the year 1265. Then
in a poem set in the imaginary year of 1300 that man would be in fact
thirty-five years old. That is indeed
exactly at the midpoint of a canonical lifespan of seventy years. “The days of our years are threescore years
and ten”, says the Psalmist; “and if by reason of strength they be fourscore
years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we
fly away.” There is a certain pleasing
lack of dogmatism in this verse. Seventy
is the norm, but you might make it to eighty.
It still has a sobering impact, especially should you, the reader, just happen to be seventy-nine years and nine
months, say.
