ON MY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, I stopped counting the places in which I had lived. Sometimes for just a few weeks, sometimes for a decade or more, the map of the world consisted for me not of its conventional representation on a globe, like the one that sat by my bed when I was a child, but of a personal cartography in which the largest masses of land were the places in which I spent the longest periods, and the islands the ones of briefer passage. Like the model of oneself designed by physiologists in which the size of each feature is given according to the importance we lend it in our mind, my model of the world is the map of my experience.
It is difficult to answer the question where is my home. My house and my library are like the shell of a crustacean, but along what seabed am I slowly crawling? “I had no nation now but the imagination,” wrote Derek Walcott. This is as true for me today as it was in my childhood. I remember as a child trying to imagine from where I stood indoors the garden outside, then the street, the neighborhood, the city, enlarging the space of vision circle after circle until I thought I could see all around me the pinpointed darkness of the cosmos depicted in my natural sciences book. Stephen Dedalus had the same impulse when he inscribed on the flyleaf of his geography book his name and then “Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.” We want to know the full extent of that which is supposed to embrace us.
The place I live in defines me, at least in part, at least during the time I’m there. The presence of a market or a forest, the knowledge of certain events and certain customs, one language spoken by those around me rather than another, all change a multitude of my actions and reactions. Goethe observed, “No one wanders under palm-trees unpunished, and certainly one’s way of thinking alters in a country where elephants and tigers are at home.” The local fauna and flora shape my features. Where I am and who I am intertwine, and one questions the other. After leaving a place, I ask myself what is different in me now, what quality of taste or touch, what intonation, what subtle shift in the phrasing of a thought.
Memory, too, of course, is different. In Lawrence Durrell’s Constance; or, Solitary Practices, a certain Mrs. Macleod, in her diary titled An English-woman on the Nile, makes this observation: “In Egypt one acts upon impulse as there is no rain to make one reflect.” For a Sudanese in England the contrary is true: Mustafa Sa’eed, the enigmatic stranger who confides in the narrator of Season of Migration to the North, says that in soggy London “my soul contained not a drop of sense of fun.” Places define us as we define them. Cartography is an art of mutual creation.
The places we name don’t exist spontaneously: we conjure them up. The universe is blind to its own measures, its dimensions, its speed and duration, and as in the medieval definition of the godhead, the world is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We, however, carry our center within us and from our secret corner call out to the universe and say, “You orbit around me.” Home patch, township, province, fatherland, continent, hemisphere are our necessary inventions, like the unicorn and the basilisk. As the Bellman says in The Hunting of the Snark:
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Pole and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!”
Faithful to his assertion, the Bellman provides his crew with the best and most accurate map: a perfect and absolute blank—the exact definition of our universe unobserved. Within this blank, we draw squares and circles, and trace paths from one place to another in order to have the illusion of being somewhere and someone. Northrop Frye tells the story of a doctor friend who, crossing the Arctic tundra with an Inuit guide, was caught in a blizzard. In the icy dark, outside the boundaries he knew, the doctor cried out, “We are lost!” His Inuit guide looked at him thoughtfully and answered, “We are not lost. We are here.”
We are cartographers at heart and we parcel and label our “here” and believe that we move about, towards alien territory, perhaps merely in order to shift our grounding and our sense of identity. And so we believe that in one place we are alone and look out onto the world, and in another we are among our brethren and look back upon our self, lost somewhere in the past. We pretend to travel from home to foreign countries, from a singular experience to a communal alien one, from whom we once were towards whom we’ll one day be, living in a constant state of exile. We forget that, wherever we find ourselves, we are always “here.”
Never ask the way of someone who knows it, because then you won’t be able to get lost.
—RABBI NAHMAN OF BRATSLAV, Tales
Far from the Aristotelian notion of a subservient nature, on the morning of Easter Friday 1300, the year of Christendom’s first jubilee, Dante emerged from a dark forest. The attempt to describe it to his readers renewed in him the fear he had felt: it was “wild and rough and strong,” and so “bitter” that death could scarcely be worse. He could not remember how he had entered the forest because he was full of sleep at the time, but as he finally came out of the darkness he saw before him a mountain rising at the end of the valley, and above the mountain the rays of the Easter sun. In his text the exact location of the forest is not given: it is everywhere and nowhere, the place into which we enter when our senses are blurred, and the place from which we emerge when the rays of the sun wake us, the dark place Saint Augustine called “the bitter forest of the world.” Dark things happen in the darkness, as our fairy tales tell us, but it may be that, since our expulsion from the forest that was also a garden, the path through the other terrible forest is almost certainly our promised path into the light. It is only when Dante has crossed the forest where “I spent the night so piteously” that he can begin the journey that will lead him to an understanding of his own humanity.1
The entire Commedia can be read both as an exodus from the forest and as a pilgrimage towards the human condition. (Dante himself stresses the importance of reading correctly the biblical verse “When Israel went forth from Egypt.”)2 And not only towards a perception of the pilgrim’s singularity: also, and most important, towards his condition as a member of the human fold, contaminated and redeemed by what others have done and what others are. Not once during his voyage after leaving the forest is Dante alone.3 Met by Virgil or by Beatrice, speaking with souls condemned or saved, addressed by demons or angels, Dante progresses through constant dialogue with others: he advances through conversation. Dante’s voyage coincides with the telling of that voyage.
As noted earlier, conversation is the reason the dead have not lost the gift of language: it enables them to communicate with the living. This is why their physical form, shuffled off on this earth, is apparent to Dante when he meets them, so that he might know he speaks with humans and not merely with intangible spirits. In the dark forest he is alone, but after that, never again.
Dante’s forlorn forest is a place through which we must all pass in order to emerge more conscious of our humanity. It rises in all its awful darkness as a long succession of forests: some older, like the demon forest through which Gilgamesh must journey at the beginning of our literatures, or like the one that first Odysseus and then Aeneas must traverse on their quests; others more recently sprung up, like the live forest that moves forward to defeat Macbeth, or the black forest in which Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb and Hansel and Gretel lose their innocent way, or the blood-soaked forest of the marquis de Sade’s unfortunate heroines, or even the pedagogical forests to which Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs entrust their young. There are forests on the edge of other worlds, forests of the night of the soul, of erotic agony, of visionary threat, of the final totterings of old age, of the unfolding of adolescent longing. It is of such forests that Henry James’s father wrote in a letter addressed to his adolescent sons: “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”4
Such unsubdued forests are always duplicitous: they lend us the illusion that it is here, in the darkness, that the action takes place, and yet we know the forests are defined not only by their trees and filtered light but also by their frame, the land that surrounds them and lends them context. Into a forest we are lured, but we are never allowed to forget that there is another world waiting outside. Inside may be darkness (even Milton’s over-quoted “darkness visible”) and yet a web of shapes and shadows outline the promise of a twilight sky. There we must stand each alone, in this preparatory stage, an initiation ground for that which is still to come: the encounter with the other.
Thirty-two cantos away from the shadows of the forest, almost at the end of Dante’s descent into Hell, he reaches the frozen lake where the souls of traitors are trapped up to the neck in ice. Among the dreadful heads that shout and curse, Dante hits his foot against one and then thinks he recognizes in the shivering features a certain Bocca degli Abati, who in Florence betrayed his party and took arms on the side of the enemy. Dante asks the angry soul his name and, as has been his custom throughout the magical journey, promises to bring the sinner posthumous fame by writing about him when he returns among the living. Bocca answers that he wishes for the exact opposite, and orders Dante to leave him to his unrepentance. Furious at the insult, Dante grabs hold of Bocca by the scruff of the neck and threatens to tear out every hair on his head unless he gets an answer.
Then he to me: “Even if you leave me bald,
I will not tell you my name, nor show you my face,
even if you pound my head a thousand times.”
Hearing this, Dante tears out “more than one fistful,” making the tortured sinner howl in pain. (Another condemned soul cries out to him, “What ails you, Bocca”—thus revealing his name.)5
Some way farther, Dante and Virgil encounter more souls embedded in the ice whose “very weeping allows them not to weep”: their eyes are sealed with frozen tears. Hearing Dante and Virgil speak, one of them begs that the strangers remove from his eyes “the hard veils” before his weeping freezes them again. Dante agrees to do so, swearing, “If I do not extricate you, may I go to the bottom of the ice,” but in exchange the soul has to tell him who he is. The soul agrees and explains that he is Friar Abrigo, condemned for murdering his brother and nephew, who had insulted him. Then Abrigo asks Dante to reach out his hand and fulfill his promise, but Dante refuses: “and to be rude to him was courtesy.” All the while, Virgil, Dante’s heaven-appointed guide, remains silent.6
Virgil’s silence can be read as approval. Several circles earlier, as both poets are ferried across the River Styx, Dante sees one of the souls condemned for the sin of wrath rise from the filthy waters, and, as usual, asks him who he is. The soul doesn’t give his name but says that he is merely one who weeps, for which Dante, unmoved, curses him horribly. Delighted, Virgil takes Dante in his arms and fulsomely praises his ward with the same words Saint Luke uses in his Gospel in praise of Christ (“blessed be she who bore you”).7 Dante, taking advantage of Virgil’s encouragement, says that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to see the sinner plunged back into the ghastly swill. Virgil agrees, and the episode ends with Dante giving thanks to God for granting his wish. Outside the forest, the rules of engagement do not follow our own code of ethics: they are not exclusively our own.
Over the centuries, commentators have tried to justify Dante’s actions as instances of what Thomas Aquinas identified as “noble indignation” or “just anger,” not the sin of wrath but the virtue of being roused by the “right cause.”8 The other punished souls gleefully call out to Dante the sinner’s name: he is Filippo Argenti, Dante’s fellow Florentine and one of his former political enemies, who acquired some of Dante’s confiscated property after Dante was banished. Argenti received his nickname (Silver) for having shod his horses with silver rather than iron; his misanthropy was such that he rode through Florence with his legs outstretched so that he could wipe his boots on the passersby. Boccaccio described him as “thin and strong, scornful, easily drawn to wrath and eccentric.”9 Argenti’s history seems to bring a sense of private vindictiveness to mingle with whatever loftier sentiments of justice may have driven Dante to curse him in the name of “the right cause.”
The problem, of course, resides in the reading of “right.” In this case, “right” refers to Dante’s understanding of the unquestionable justice of God. “Shall mortal man be more just than God?” asks one of Job’s friends. “Shall a man be more pure than his maker?” (Job 4:17). Implicit in the question is the belief that to feel compassion for the damned is “wrong” because it means setting oneself against God’s imponderable will and questioning his justice. Only three cantos earlier, Dante was able to faint with pity when hearing the tale of Francesca, condemned to whirl forever in the wind that punishes the lustful. But now, advanced in his progress through Hell, Dante is less of a sentimentalist and more a believer in the higher authority.10
According to Dante’s faith, the legal system decreed by God cannot be mistaken or wicked; therefore, whatever it determines to be just must be so, even if human understanding cannot grasp its validity. Aquinas, discussing the relation between truth and God’s justice, argued that truth is a pairing of mind and reality: for human beings, this pairing will always be incomplete, since the human mind is by nature faulty; for God, whose mind is all-embracing, the apprehension of truth is absolute and perfect. Therefore, since God’s justice orders things according to his wisdom, we must consider it to be equivalent to the truth. This is how Aquinas explains it: “Therefore God’s justice, which establishes things in the order conformable to the rule of His wisdom, which is the law of His justice, is suitably called truth. Thus we also in human affairs speak of the truth of justice.”11
This “truth of justice” that Dante seeks (his deliberate infliction of pain on the prisoner in the ice, and his prurient desire to see the other prisoner tortured in the mire) must be understood (his supporters say) as humble obedience to the law of God and acceptance of his superior judgment. But for most readers, such neatness is not satisfactory. An argument similar to that of Aquinas is put forward today by those who object to the investigation and prosecution of official murderers and torturers who are said to act under government orders. And yet, as almost any reader of Dante will admit, however cogent the theological or political arguments may be, these infernal passages leave a bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps the reason is that if Dante’s justification lies in the nature of divine will, then instead of Dante’s actions being redeemed by the religious dogma, the dogma is undermined by Dante’s actions, and human nature is debased, not elevated, by the divine. Much the same way, the implicit condoning of torturers merely because their abuses are said to have taken place in the unchangeable past and under the superior law of a previous administration, instead of encouraging faith in the present administration’s policies, undermines that faith and those policies. And worse still: left unchallenged, the worn-out excuse “I merely obeyed orders,” tacitly accepted, acquires new prestige and serves as precedent for future exculpations.
There is, however, another way to view Dante’s actions. Sin, theologians say, is contagious, and in the presence of sinners, Dante becomes contaminated by their faults: among the lustful he pities the weak flesh to the point of fainting, among the wrathful he is filled with bestial anger, among the traitors he betrays even his own human condition, because no one, certainly not Dante, is incapable of sinning as others have sinned. Our fault lies not in the possibility of evil but in our consent to do evil. In a landscape where a certain evil flourishes, consent is easier to give.
Landscape is of the essence in the Commedia: where things happen is almost as important as what happens there. The relationship is symbiotic: the geography of the Otherworld colors the events and the souls lodged therein, and these color the chasms and cornices, the woods and the water. For centuries Dante’s readers have understood that the places of the afterlife are supposed to conform to a physical reality and this precision lends the Commedia no small measure of its power.
For Dante, broadly following Ptolemy, whose model of the universe he corrected under the stronger influence of Aristotle, the earth is a motionless sphere in the center of the universe, around which run nine concentric heavens that correspond to the nine angelic orders. The first seven spheres are the planetary heavens: of the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The eighth is the heaven of the fixed stars. The ninth, the crystalline heaven, is the Primum Mobile, the invisible source of the diurnal rotation of the heavenly bodies. Surrounding this is the Empyrean, wherein blooms the divine rose in the center of which is God. The earth itself is divided into two hemispheres: the northern hemisphere, inhabited by humankind, whose midpoint is Jerusalem, equidistant from the Ganges to the east and the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to the west; and the southern, a watery realm forbidden to human exploration, at the center of which rises the island mountain of Purgatory, sharing the same horizon as Jerusalem. At the top of Purgatory is the Garden of Eden. Beneath Jerusalem is the inverted cone of Hell, at the core of which is embedded Lucifer, whose fall pushed up the land that formed Mount Purgatory. The two rivers, the holy city, and the southern mountain form a cross within the earth’s sphere. Hell is divided into nine decreasing circles, reminiscent of the grades in an amphitheater. The first five circles constitute Upper Hell, the following four Lower Hell, which is a city fortified with iron walls. The waters of Lethe have opened a crack in the bottom of Hell, offering a path that leads to the base of Mount Purgatory.
So detailed is Dante’s geography that in the Renaissance several scholars undertook an analysis of the information provided in the poem to determine the exact measurements of Dante’s realm of the damned. Among these was Antonio Manetti, a member of the Platonic Academy of Florence and friend of the Academy’s founder, the great humanist Marsilio Ficino. An ardent reader of Dante, Manetti used his political connections to influence Lorenzo de’ Medici to assist in the repatriation of the poet’s remains to Florence, and his extensive knowledge of the Commedia to write a preface for an important annotated edition of the poem edited by Cristoforo Landino and published in 1481, which included Landino’s reflections on the measurements of Hell. In his preface, Manetti discussed the entire Commedia mainly from a linguistic point of view; in a text published posthumously, in 1506, Manetti centered his investigations on the geography of the Inferno.
In the literary as in the scientific realm, every original argument seems to elicit its contrary. In opposition to Manetti, another humanist, Alessandro Vellutello, a Venetian by adoption, decided to write a new geography of Dante’s Inferno, mocking Manetti’s “Florentine” views and arguing for more universal considerations. According to Vellutello, Landino’s measurements were faulty and the Florentine Manetti, basing his own calculations on those of his predecessor, was nothing but “a man who is blind seeking guidance from a man who is one-eyed.”12 The members of the Florentine Academy received the comments as an insult and swore revenge.
In 1587, to counter the perceived indignity, the Academy resolved to invite a talented young scientist to rebut Vellutello’s arguments. The twenty-year-old Galileo Galilei was then an unlicensed mathematician who had made his name in intellectual circles with his studies of the movements of the pendulum and his invention of hydrostatic scales. Galileo accepted. The full title of his talks, given in the Hall of the Two Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, was Two Lessons Read Before the Academy of Florence Concerning the Shape, Location and Size of Dante’s Hell.13
A depiction of the terraces of Hell from Antonio Manetti’s Dialogo (Florence, 1506). Reading from top to bottom, after Limbo are the terraces of the Lustful, the Gluttonous, the Avaricious, the Wrathful and Sullen, the Violent, and Barrators. The Well leads down to the Frozen Lake. (Photograph courtesy of Livio Ambrogio. Reproduced by permission.)
In the first lesson, Galileo follows Manetti’s description and adds to it his own calculations, with learned references to Archimedes and Euclid. To measure the height of Lucifer, for instance, he takes as his starting point Dante’s statements that the face of Nimrod is as long as the bronze pinecone of Saint Peter’s in Rome (which in Dante’s time stood in front of the church and measured seven and a half feet) and that Dante’s height is to a giant as the giant’s is to Lucifer’s arm. Using for his calculations Albrecht Dürer’s chart to measure the human body (published in 1528 as Four Books on the Human Proportions), Galileo concludes that Nimrod was 645 fathoms tall. Based on that figure, he calculates the length of Lucifer’s arm which in turn allows him, using the rule of three, to determine Lucifer’s height: 1,935 fathoms. Poetic imagination, according to Galileo, obeys the laws of universal mathematics.14
In the second lesson, Galileo exposes (and refutes) the calculations of Vellutello, which was the conclusion the members of the Florentine Academy were waiting for. Surprisingly, for those who read them from the distance of five centuries, in both these lessons Galileo embraces Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe, perhaps because in order to deny Vellutello and side with Manetti, he found it more convenient to take Dante’s view of the universe for granted.
Retribution, once obtained, is often quickly forgotten. The members of the Academy never mentioned the lectures again, and neither were the hellish explorations of the young Galileo collected by his last disciple, Vincenzo Viviani, in his edition of his master’s works, published after Galileo’s death in 1642. But certain texts are infinitely patient. Three centuries later, in 1850, the Italian scholar Octavo Gigli was researching the work of a minor sixteenth-century philologist when he came across a thin manuscript wherein he believed he could recognize the handwriting of Galileo, which he had seen once by chance on a piece of paper in the house of a sculptor friend (such are the miracles of scholarship). The manuscript proved to be that of Galileo’s Lectures on Dante, which the over-scrupulous secretary of the Academy at the time had not entered into the official registry because the young mathematician was not an elected member but merely a guest (such are the abominations of bureaucracy).
Long ago, Copernicus’s discoveries shifted the self-centered vision of our world to a corner that has since constantly shifted farther and farther towards the margins of the universe. The realization that we, human beings, are aleatory, minimal, a casual convenience for self-reproducing molecules is not conducive to high hopes or great ambitions. And yet what the philosopher Nicola Chiaromonte called “the worm of consciousness” is also part of our being, so that, however ephemeral and distant, we, these particles of stardust, are also a mirror in which all things, ourselves included, are reflected.15
This modest glory should suffice. Our passing (and, on a tiny scale, the passing of the universe with us) is ours to record: a patient and bootless effort begun when we first started to read the world. Like the geography of what we call the world, what we call the history of the world is an ongoing chronicle which we pretend to decipher as we make it up. From the beginning, such chronicles purport to be told by their witnesses, whether they be true or false. In book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus praises the bard who sings the misfortunes of the Greeks “as if you were there yourself or heard from one who was.”16 The “as if” is of the essence. If we accept this, then history is the story of what we say has happened, even though the justifications we give for our testimony cannot, however hard we try, be justified.
Centuries later, in a severe German classroom, Hegel would divide history into three categories: history written by its assumed direct witnesses (ursprünglische Geschichte), history as a meditation upon itself (reflektierende Geschichte) and history as philosophy (philosophische Geschichte), which eventually results in what we agree to call world history (Welt-Geschichte), the never-ending story that includes itself in the telling. Immanuel Kant had earlier imagined two different concepts of our collective evolution: Historie to define the mere recounting of facts and Geschichte, a reasoning of those facts—even an a priori Geschichte, the chronicle of an announced course of events to come. Hegel pointed out that in German the term Geschichte comprised both the objective and subjective sense and simultaneously meant historia rerum gestarum (the history of the chronicle of events) and res gestae (the history of exploits or the events themselves). For Hegel, what mattered was the understanding of (or the illusion of understanding) the entire flow of events as a whole, including the riverbed and its coastal observers, and in order to better concentrate on the main, from this torrent he excluded the margins, the lateral pools and the estuaries.17
In an essay admirably titled Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, the Hungarian scholar László Földényi suggests that this is the horror Dostoyevsky discovers in his Siberian prison: that history, whose victim he knows he is, ignores his existence, that his suffering goes on unnoticed or, worse, serves no purpose in the general flow of humankind. What Hegel proposes, in Dostoyevsky’s eyes (and in Földényi’s) is what Kafka would later say to Max Brod: there is “no end of hope, only not for us.” Hegel’s caveat is even more terrible than the illusory existence proposed by the idealists: we are perceived but we are not seen.18
Such an assumption is, for Földényi (as it must have seemed to Dostoyevsky) inadmissible. Not only can history not dismiss anyone from its course, but the reverse is true: the acknowledgement of everyone is necessary for history to be. My existence, any person’s existence, is contingent on your being, on any other person’s being, and both of us must exist for Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Földényi to exist, since we (the anonymous others) are their proof and their ballast, bringing them to life in our reading. This is what is meant by the ancient intuition that we are all part of an ineffable whole in which every singular death and every particular suffering affects the entire human collective, a whole that is not limited by each material self, a whole that Dante knows he must attempt to understand through a few of its individual parts. The worm of consciousness mines but also proves our existence; it is no use denying it, even as an act of faith. “The myth that denies itself,” says Földényi wisely, “the faith that pretends to know: this is the gray hell, this is the universal schizophrenia with which Dostoyevsky stumbled on his way.”19
Our imagination allows us always one hope more, beyond the one shattered or fulfilled, one as yet seemingly unattainable frontier that we’ll eventually reach, only to propose another lying farther away. Forgetting this limitlessness (as Hegel tried to do by trimming down his notion of what counts as history) may grant us the pretty illusion that what takes place in the world and in our life is fully understandable. But it reduces the questioning of the universe to catechism and that of our existence to dogma. As Földényi argues, and Dante would have agreed, what we want is not the consolation of that which seems reasonable and probable but the unexplored Siberian regions of the impossible, the “here” always present beyond the horizon.
If “beyond” implies an open question, it also implies a center from which we conceive the world, a position that enables us to claim superiority over the alien others out there. The Greeks saw Delphi as the center of the universe, the Romans claimed that it was Rome, whose secret name is “Love” (Roma read backwards is Amor).20 For Islamic people, the center of the world is Mecca, for the Jewish people it is Jerusalem. Ancient China recognized that center in Taishan, at an equal distance from the four sacred mountains of the Middle Kingdom. Indonesians see that center in Bali. While the assumed geographical center lends an identity to those who assume it, whatever lies “out there” has identifying properties as well that are too often perceived as potentially threatening or dangerously infectious.
Through cultural and commercial contacts, through imagistic and symbolic dialogues, what happens beyond affects travelers who leave their home center. Not all show the openness and understanding of the Persian polymath Abū al-Rayhān Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Bīrūnīas, known in English simply as Al-Biruni, who in the tenth century visited India and, after observing the local religious rituals remarked, “If the beliefs they hold differ from ours and even seem abominable to Muslims, I have only this to say: This is what Hindus believe, and this is their own way of seeing things.” A long tradition of imperialistic thought holds that the only methods for converting the beyond are enslavement or assimilation. Virgil makes this explicit in the words of Anchises to his son, Aeneas:
Let others fashion from bronze more lifelike, breathing images—
For so they shall—and evoke living faces from marble;
Others excel as orators, others track with their instruments
The planets circling in heaven and predict when stars will appear.
But, Romans, never forget that government is your medium!
Be this your art:—to practice men in the habit of peace,
Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors.21
In 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss published a book that would become famous as an attempt to overcome the imperialist view of how to enter into dialogue with peoples beyond the limits of one’s own culture. Among the Caduveo people, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, Lévi-Strauss found a way of communicating and learning without overbearing or translating these people’s thoughts into his own system of beliefs. Commenting on his reaction to a simple Buddhist rite, Lévi-Strauss wrote: “Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favour of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began. It is 2,500 years since men first discovered and formulated these truths. In the interval, we have found nothing new, except—as we have tried in turn all possible ways out of the dilemma—so many additional proofs of the conclusion that we would have liked to avoid.” To this, Lévi-Strauss adds, “This great religion of non-knowledge is not based on our inability to understand. It bears witness to that ability and raises us to a pitch at which we can discover the truth in the form of a mutual exclusiveness of being and knowledge. Through an additional act of boldness, it reduces the metaphysical problem to one of human behaviour—a distinction it shares only with Marxism. Its schism occurred on the sociological level, the fundamental difference between the Great and the Little Ways being the question of whether the salvation of a single individual depends, or does not depend, on the salvation of humanity as a whole.”22
Dante’s Commedia seems to answer the question in the negative. The salvation of Dante depends on Dante himself, as Virgil at the very beginning of the journey upbraids him: “What is it then? Why, why do you stand back? / Why do you nurse so much cowardice in your heart? / Why don’t you show courage and determination?”23 Dante’s will and Dante’s will alone will allow him to reach the final blessed vision after having seen the horrors of the damned and been cleansed of the seven deadly sins. And yet . . .
The first image that confronts Dante when he ascends into Paradise is that of Beatrice gazing at God’s sun. Comparing himself to the fisherman Glaucus, who, according to Ovid, having tasted magic grass that grew on the shore was seized with a longing to plunge into the deep, Dante is filled with longings of the divine. But at the same time he realizes that the place he comes from is necessarily the human commonwealth—that to be human is not a singular state but one pertaining to a plurality. Personal will and sensations and thoughts are not, for all their individuality, isolated experiences. In the words of Lévi-Strauss: “Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe.” And using the same rainbow image that Dante describes at the end of his vision, Lévi-Strauss concludes: “When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement.”24
This is the paradox: after the unspeakable experience of suffering the world alone, and trying to narrate that experience to ourselves, consciously and unconsciously we enter the world of things shared, but here, we realize, communication, full communication, is no longer possible. Through perfunctory verbal excuses we allow ourselves to commit terrible deeds because, we say, others committed them. In the world at large, we repeat the same justifications endlessly, doing violence to the violent and betraying the traitors.
The dark forest is terrible, but it defines itself and its limits, and in doing so frames the world outside and allows us to discern that which we want to attain, whether the seashore or the mountain’s peak. But past the forest, the world of experience has no such borders. Everything beyond, like the universe, is simultaneously limited and expanding, not boundless but of boundaries impossible to conceive, utterly unconscious of itself, the stage of both historia rerum gestarum and res gestae. Here we set ourselves up as actors and as witnesses, each a “single individual” and each part of “humanity as a whole.” And here we live.
