THIS SUMMER, in Mississippi, I sat by my father’s bed for three weeks and watched him die. After that, I drove one of my kids from Kentucky to New England for a college visit. Along the way, we climbed a mountain and spent the night in a rest area when we couldn’t find a motel room. Then, with five-sixths of my family and three weeks’ worth of camping gear packed into (and onto) an aging minivan, we drove to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. Along the way, in British Columbia, we went through an active wildfire and saw a tree explode into flames about 50 feet from our van. At Banff we saw a moose, two grizzly bears, and the vast acres of gravel left behind by the rapidly receding Columbia Icefield.
On every step of this long, strange trip, I carried with me a big, fat, well-worn paperback book, its margins filled with my youngest son’s class notes. So, what did I do this summer? I read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Every night—well, most nights—I spent 15 or 20 minutes accompanying the poet of the early 1300s down into the depths of Hell, up the winding mountain trails of Purgatory, and on to the beatific vision of Paradise.
At our kids’ school, everyone reads The Divine Comedy in 11th grade: the whole thing, all year long. And they mostly love it, or learn to. Then, at a parents’ meeting this year, my wife, Polly, learned that another mother was reading Dante along with her child and loving it. Soon Polly challenged many of our friends and colleagues to read the entire Divine Comedy over the summer. One hundred cantos, each about four pages of poetry, plus translator’s notes. One canto per day.
For years, I’ve spent part of my summer reading some super-sized classic novel that I should have read decades ago, but hadn’t. This year I had my heart set on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. But, hey, a challenge is a challenge ...
And I don’t regret it a bit. I was reading “The Inferno” at my father’s bedside as he went through a few nights of hell on his way toward paradise. “The Purgatorio” gave metaphoric resonance to the towering Rocky Mountains, and “The Paradiso” gave me a vision of a time worth recapturing, when all the greatest artists and intellectuals saw the Jewish-Christian story as the organizing principle of the universe.
But mostly I was struck with how very modern, or at least unmedieval, Dante was. His pilgrim narrator on this spiritual journey was no generic Everyman. It was Alighieri himself, a fully realized, autobiographical, first-person narrator in the throes of a midlife crisis, yearning for an unrequited love, driven by literary ambition, and outraged at the corruption of church and state in his beloved Italy. In fact, there were passages, especially those where he talked poetry with his spirit guide Virgil, in which Dante struck me as the true ancestor of Norman Mailer and his Advertisements for Myself.
And all the suffering, struggling, or rejoicing souls that the pilgrim meets along the way are not allegorical figures. They are actual people drawn from Dante’s own era, often named by name, with their real-life follies and hypocrisies exposed for all to see, for all eternity. And they are enduring very specific punishments or penances that the poet crafted to visualize the consequences of our common moral weaknesses.
About halfway through my Dante project, I remembered the moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Lucy says to Schroeder, “Everyone talks about how ‘great’ Beethoven was. ... How can you say someone is great who’s never had his picture on bubble gum cards?”
I still don’t know much about Beethoven. But now I can tell you: Dante Alighieri was great, even without the bubble gum cards.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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