To See the Stars Again

Midway in the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark forest,
          for the right path was lost"
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

As every Italian schoolchild (including my third son) knows, the Divina Commedia opens at the start of the 14th Century, in a supernatural "dark forest" just before sunrise on Good Friday. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. At the request of a woman called Beatrice, the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell.

Dante's three tier journey from the unearthly dark woods down to the Inferno and through its nine main circles (24 divisions in total) to salvation by way of Purgatory would last one week, in a poem that would take over 20 years to write. I frequently discuss this Tuscan tour de force when I Zoom with my son to help him in his studies, and it has brought back memories of my introduction to the epic poem.

I had first come across an English translation of Dante's Inferno at age six, and the first part of the Commedia was to inadvertently make me a fan boy of horror literature for life, but this optimistic tale of salvation isn't a horror story. Dante's Inferno is not a rejoicing but a rejection of sin and without the purge of its horror you can't appreciate the paradise to come; it is Catholic catharsis at its best.

And if you go by its numerous famous fans (especially lapsed Catholics) the Inferno is the really interesting canticle, because Dante's tour of Hell is where the recognisable human drama of transgression and punishment is depicted. Samuel Beckett kept a copy of The Divine Comedy by his bedside as he lay dying in a Paris hospice in 1989. Oscar Wilde would remember to ask for a copy of Dante when in prison on a charge of "gross indecency", even though The Divine Comedy accounts homosexuality an offence almost too grievous to be atoned for.

At first instance, it would seem that the siren call of damnation calls to us in a way that the subsequent sagas of atonement and emotional rescue do not - the final act has even been called "boring" in comparison. However, as a young child it seemed to me, for the most part, that many writers were stuck between the opening lines of the Commedia (ché la diritta via era smarrita) and the four concluding words of the Inferno (a riveder le stelle) because it lights a beacon of hope in hearts that have known darkness.

Thus, as I explained to my son this Good Friday, it isn't the terrible imagery or cruelty of the Inferno that charms many great minds; it's the hope that "having lost one's way" we will eventually find the right path. Like Beckett, who in his work tries to shoot order through the void, or the pain hidden beneath Wilde's wit against an insensitive world, it may be that when we read Dante it will be for shelter in personal dark times, in the hope that, like our 700 year-old protagonist, we will "see the stars again".

This is how I read the epic poem at any rate: the more arduous the journey that needs to be overcome, the more redemptive the reward of overcoming it. The hell one goes through makes the salvation of the shelter we seek even more gratifying when it's ultimately found.

That message is an appropriate allegory, not just for Easter or our times - however Ballardian the future turns out to be - but for a human being in any lifetime. And as the science fiction of J. G. Ballard shows us, we may progress technologically and become more advanced, but the ordinary concerns we have today (amidst the extraordinary) will be of concern tomorrow, too.

And while it is debatable how far we have come (or will ever go) from what was considered a sin in the Middle Ages, what will always be relevant is the hope we hold on to during difficult times. How perfectly inspirational then, that a medieval descent into hell can be a lesson to look up to the stars.

Read more: An Easter Quatrain >>