Morning Thanks--Ringing True

Bouguereau Dante and Virgil in Hell

This little confession, I love. 

It's a passage from Peter S. Hawkins' Dante: A Brief History, who throughout his long career at Yale Divinity has been a Dante scholar. 

In his preface, Hawkins admits his love of Dante was hardly "at first sight." His regard--his love--for the great Italian poet grew slowly, he admits. At 20, as an undergraduate, Hawkins says he was "too immature to enter into Dante's world." He holds the copy of the Divine Comedy he read back then, for class. 

Here's the story.

At the end of canto 27, Dante and Virgil, after journeying down through Hell and then up the winding path of the purgatorial mountain, stand on the brink of Eden. On the edge of Paradise regained, Virgil bids his "son," the pilgrim, goodbye--words that turn out to be his last in the Commedia. In this valediction Virgil offers both a summation of what Dante's learned over the long course of their journey together and of the person he's become:

    My son, you've seen the temporary fire
and the eternal fire; you  have reached
the place past which my powers cannot see.
    I've brought you here through intellect and art;
from now on, let your pleasure be your guide;
you're past the steep and past the narrow paths.
    Look at the sun that shines upon your brow;
look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs
born here, spontaneously, of the earth.
    Among them, you can rest or walk until
the coming of the glad and lovely eyes --
those eyes that, weeping, sent me to your side.
    Await no further word or sign from me:
your will is free, erect, and whole -- to act
against that will would be to err: therefore
    I crown and miter you over yourself.
(Purg. 27, 127-42)

Even after many years of teaching the Commedia, I still savor this moment with my students and see my own vocation afresh. It no doubt has resonance with anyone who has given his or her best to someone younger, and then recognized (a tear in the eye) that it is now time to let go. 

How could it be, then, that in the margin of that now-yellowed Purgatorio there appears a single word written in pencil in what I recognize to be my youthful handwriting: "Yawn."

If you're like me, you can't help giggle at that confession, so rich that story is--beginning to end--in our own blessed humanity.