In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love. Joseph Luzzi

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      At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.

      “Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.” With these Latin words—the ancient language meant to convey the authority of his new master, Love—Dante proclaims Beatrice’s dominion over his heart. He would not see her again for another nine years, when he was eighteen and she seventeen. When he finally does, the illness returns, reducing him to uncontrollable tears and forcing him into the shameful privacy of his bedroom.

      The Vita Nuova describes how these visions of Beatrice continue to inspire a mix of ecstasy and anguish in Dante. One day he falls ill, very ill, afflicted by a painful disease that makes him languish in bed for nine days. On the ninth day, he has a vision that is even more terrifying than his illness: the wild-haired ladies appear in his delirium, announcing, “Tu pur morrai.”

      One even tells him that he is already dead. Another says to him that Beatrice, his miraculous lady, has departed from this world.

      The delirium breaks. He realizes it was all a dream: Beatrice still lives. But not for long. The vision was actually a premonition. They may have been wearing sumptuous robes, Dante realizes, but the women with the disheveled hair were witches.

      Terrified of my own daydreams and desperate for help, I left the chilled balcony and phoned the chaplain whom I had encountered my first snowy day in the Underworld.

      A FEW DAYS AFTER I called the chaplain, she and I met at a coffee shop near campus in the village of Red Hook.

      An ordained minister, Georgia was a curly-haired woman in her fifties, with gentle eyes and small shoulders that sat incongruously on a large lower frame. She lived just up the road from my apartment. I often saw her out walking and would occasionally run into her at the Tivoli library. During the memorial service for Katherine at Bard she had been a calm, dignified presence, and when I saw her walking in the snow I felt as though she had been sent to help me.

      I told her that I had been trying to connect with God. I had been reading the Bible, annotating the margins of the edition I had been given for my Catholic confirmation. I tried to identify with Job, but he was too old, his suffering impossibly extravagant. I tried to pray, I told Georgia, even got down on my knees on the hardwood floor of my apartment, just as I was taught to do as a child—just as I had in the yellow chapel of St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie as the neurosurgeons worked on Katherine’s traumatized brain. Dante believed that prayer expedited your way through Purgatory to Paradise, with hundreds of years lopped off in a single fervent supplication. Countless letters were arriving, from my friends, Katherine’s friends, our families, my colleagues, people I grew up with, long-lost connections. I even received consoling words from Leila Cooper, a playmate from my childhood and the first girl I ever had a crush on. The mother of one of my students, a woman I had never met, wrote to say that I was in her prayers. During the funeral in Detroit, hundreds of my father-in-law’s friends told me that they were praying for me. I would instinctively answer: pray for Isabel. But my own praying felt too staged to be genuine.

      I confessed my guilt to Georgia. I knew it was irrational, but I somehow felt responsible for my wife’s death. I regretted that I wasn’t with her that morning. And, although I had tried to take good care of Katherine, I could not shake the feeling that I had failed to protect her.

      “A better man would not have pushed Katherine so hard to succeed in school, to bring in extra money, right?” I asked.

      “You’re a victim, not a culprit,” she answered.

      She said that when someone God loves dies, he too feels unbearable sorrow. He watched His own son die, she said, sensing that I was neither a natural believer nor a committed atheist. She saw me for what I was: someone who hates confrontation and seeks the middle way, a person who had never professed his faith explicitly and categorically. I had always treated religion like a buffet—a little prayer here, a bit of compassion there, a sampling of cosmic love to top off the meal. But I knew that real faith meant choices, which required admitting what you did not believe in as much as what you did believe. In a realm calling for decisive feeling, I was hedging my spiritual bets. I was a diplomat even with faith.

      Only the terror of my wife’s death could bring me to my knees in prayer. But that didn’t bother Georgia. She knew I needed to hear the words of a believer. By the end of our coffee, she was telling me about her favorite Italian films. We made plans to meet again soon.

      But that would be our last conversation. I had revealed my darkest thoughts because she was a stranger, but this also stopped me from telling her more. For that, I would have to find someone I shared a history with, someone familiar. Like the man I had leaned against in Piazza Santa Croce. Ever since that night in Florence, I had turned to Dante with demanding questions, none more so than the ones I was now facing. Could I love Katherine now that her body was gone? I wondered. The question reminded me of a phrase that haunted me: There is no love that is not physical. I had encountered the words in a reading long ago whose source I no longer remembered, and its mysterious wisdom had remained lodged in my brain. Dante did not write it, but his poetry led me back to those words. For he had done the unthinkable: he made his most erotic lover a woman without a body.

      THE VISIONS OF LOVE THAT terrified Dante in the Vita Nuova returned when he began his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about ten years later. Unlike most artists and writers in his Christian world, Dante understood that the sinners in hell and the saints in heaven burn with an equal amount of love. The difference between these two groups was not in the intensity of love’s flames but in what kindled them. And in hell, passion’s fire found an especially dry, combustible source in the heart of Francesca da Rimini.

      Before Dante’s imagination got hold of her, Francesca had been mentioned only once in a written source: a line in her father’s will. Dante crafted her story out of legend, hearsay, and gossip. He didn’t exactly make her up—but his poetry immortalized her. He did so around 1305, when he started to write The Divine Comedy after a few years wandering around Tuscany, trying to get back to Florence—living in the past and incapable of imagining a life outside of Florence. Once he finally accepted that he was never going to make it back, he embraced his own exile and the new perspective it offered. He reignited his imagination with a poetic fire that blazed with Francesca’s love for Paolo.

      Francesca was born in 1255, ten years before Dante. She was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, the ruler of Ravenna, a small city on the Adriatic with close ties to the Byzantine Empire. As the daughter of her city’s first family, she enjoyed all the status and wealth a young woman could hope for. But as a thinking and feeling creature, Francesca endured nothing but obstacles. Her patriarchal society didn’t allow her to apply her talents to a career or calling. Worst of all, in matters of the heart she had to follow orders, not her heart.

      The courtly love ethos of her time separated love from marriage: since most unions among the wealthy classes were based on dowries and social standing, the marital bed was the last place to look for passion. To love someone, it was understood by the educated classes, meant to worship from afar and to suffer. You could never possess your lover. But as you surrendered to the magnetic attractions of the one you loved—those virtues that actual sexual contact would only sully—your heartbroken spirit soared with the angels.

      Francesca’s father, Guido, brokered a marriage between her and Giovanni Malatesta, scion of a rival family. In uniting his daughter with the enemy, the pragmatic Guido aimed to bring peace СКАЧАТЬ