The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm Read online

  —Proverbs 5:6

  Some three thousand years after Gilgamesh, Dante tells us that, halfway along the road of life, he found himself in a dark forest. Here begins what is perhaps the most famous travel narrative in Western literature, one that will take us, Dante’s readers, through three otherworldly realms that, by means of Dante’s words, have acquired a permanent and tangible geography in our imagination. In societies with roots in Christianity, to speak of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is to make use, consciously or not, of Dante’s logbook. Beginning with the dark forest where the straight path is lost, a place “almost as bitter as death itself,” the reader follows Dante down into the infernal circles and up through the cleansing terraces and across the Heavens to the Empyrean. To think back on that forest, Dante tells us—a forest wild and rough and dense—renews in his mind the fear he felt at the time, a fear that the reader is now compelled to feel as well. And yet, however hard the task, Dante knows that he must tell of the things he saw, “for the sake of the good [he] there discovered.”³⁰ Implicit in this declared intention is a gift to the reader: it is for us that Dante will force himself to return to the scene of his perilous travels, for us that he will follow again the arduous path that led him deep into the earth and high into the heavens, for us that he will struggle to reach once more the instant of supreme vision. “You had best undertake another journey,”³¹ says Virgil to Dante at their first encounter, and offers his ward a journey that is not the one Dante intended, straight from the dark forest to the top of the blessed mountain, but one through the realms of the Afterlife, first seeing and suffering with his body, and then in his mind and through his poetry. From the first words of the first canto, we, the readers of that journey, become Dante’s fellow travelers.

  Entrance to the Wood of the Suicides. Canto XIII from

  the Divine Comedy in Opere di Dante Alighieri (Venice: A. Zatta, 1757).

  Courtesy the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  As in the case of Gilgamesh, our role as travelers differs from those of both the pilgrim and the poet. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”: we understand that these first words are the starting point of the narrative, but this is only true in a literal sense. The journey itself started much earlier. The beginning we are given to read is already halfway along the road of our life; it is only at this middle point that we are invited to join the traveler, after a lengthy stretch has already been covered, well before the book’s opening, through landscapes and episodes of the poet’s early life that Dante has chosen not to chronicle in the Commedia. We begin traveling in what medieval rhetoric formalized as in media res, in the middle of the thing itself.

  In one other important sense we are deprived of an actual beginning. The action referred to in “mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” (“I found myself in a dark forest”) has taken place long ago, in Dante’s sinful past. The adventures are now over, the terror and the surprise are distant memories, the repentance and the revelation have already happened, and the pilgrim has returned to earth, ready to bear witness. (In medieval terms, “pilgrimage” denoted a journey to the shrine and back, not a one-way passage.) Though the voyage was dangerous, the realms uncharted, the outcome unforeseen, all has now been resolved, the goal has been reached, the return to port safely effected—and all this is implied in those very first words of the poem. As the reader knows, for the poem to exist, the pilgrim must have survived, like the messengers in Job, to tell the story.

  As readers of Dante’s poem, we are therefore privileged witnesses. From the very start, we are promised a happy outcome, since that is the meaning of the title, Commedia: a story that ends happily. We know that by the end of Paradiso’s final canto the traveler will have reached his destination and will be ready to return home; indeed, that he has returned home to give an account of himself on paper. However, unlike his readers who even on their first venture are somehow aware of the Commedia’s layout, Dante, lost in the dark forest, knows nothing of what awaits him: nothing of the three dreadful beasts that will bar his path, nothing of the ghostly presence that will reveal itself as his appointed guide, nothing of the abominable and blissful souls ahead, nothing of the ultimate and ineffable bliss with which his prodigious adventures will be rewarded.

  Knowing all this and having such an advantage, will we, the readers, be equal to the task? Will we be able to become worthy travel companions of so extraordinary an adventurer? To accomplish his journey, as we know, Dante the man has become Dante the pilgrim, who in turn has become Dante the poet, the chronicler of his adventures. And we, as followers of Dante’s journey, accepting the role now assigned to us, must in turn lose our ordinary identity and become pilgrims ourselves, transformed through the act of reading into necessary characters in the story, addressed by Dante, over and over again, to warn us, guide us, instruct us, beseech us to reflect and to do our enlightened best. “Every path leading to a spiritual realization,” wrote the twentieth-century art historian Titus Burckhardt, “demands from whoever undertakes it the stripping of the habitual ‘I’ in order to become truly oneself, a transformation that is accompanied by the sacrifice of apparent riches and vain pretensions; that is to say, by the sacrifice of humiliation, of the struggle against the passions of which the old ‘I’ is made.”³² That is certainly the case of Dante the pilgrim, but it is also true of the reader. In order to follow Dante, we must strip ourselves of our everyday identity, we must leave aside the comforts of common sense and familiar references, we must sacrifice our solid and reassuring notions of factual reality, and we must humbly submit to the rules and resolutions set down by the poet for our guidance. But can we do this?

  Dante is very aware of our difficulties in this respect, and as he is about to enter the First Heaven, guided by the terrible smile of Beatrice, he speaks to the readers, his traveling companions, in warning terms:

  Oh you who in your little boat

  Longing to hear, have followed on my keel

  That sings along the way,

  Turn to see again your own home shores

  Don’t enter the open sea, or well you might

  By losing sight of me, be lost yourselves.³³

  E. R. Curtius, who gave a brief history of the metaphor of the world as book in his famous study of the persistence of classical imagery in European literature,³⁴ noted that many were the Latin poets who compared the craft of writing to that of sailing—Propertius, Manilius, Horace, and Statius among several others. In the second book of the Georgics Virgil speaks of setting sail (“vela dare”), and toward the end of the fourth he speaks of bringing the sails down (“vela trahere”).³⁵ This circular motion, beginning and ending the act of sailing forth, is essential to the idea of traveling through a text. Travel narratives, factual or allegorical, have this in common: they carry implicit in them their conclusion, and their point of departure assumes a point of arrival. Every travel narrative declares that “in my end is my beginning,” since, once having arrived, the traveler will begin the voyage again by telling of his or her adventures. In fact, the very purpose of Dante’s pilgrimage is to begin again, and this time not with fearful steps but with fiery words. “She who, for our sake, left her footprints in Hell,” says Dante of Beatrice: the same might be said of Dante by his readers. The voyage was made for us, for the sake of the story.

  Dante’s story, then, is both a landscape and a map; or rather a series of landscapes whose map is unfurled as the traveler advances through it, walking or climbing, flying on the back of a monster or being rowed across hellish waters, guided by Virgil or Statius up Mount Purgatory or carried timelessly through the Heavens by Beatrice. So precise, so vivid, so cartographically exact are Dante’s descriptions of the realms he crosses that the twenty-four-year-old Galileo, not the least empirical of men, was able to deliver, in 1588, two scientific lectures on the situation and size of Dante’s Hell. “If it has been difficult and admirable,” wrote Galileo, “for men to have succeeded, afte
r lengthy observations, endless vigils, dangerous navigations, to measure and establish the intervals between the heavens, their fast movements and their slow ones, and their relationships, and the size of heavenly bodies whether near or far away, and the sites of earth and sea (all things that, either entirely or for the most part, are prey to the senses)—then how much more marvelous must we deem the study and description of the site and size of Hell which, buried in the entrails of the Earth, hidden from our senses, is known to no one and lies beyond all experience.”³⁶ For Galileo, as for Dante, the imaginary world, just like the physical world itself, can be mapped and explored by the reader. The book is a world through which we can travel because the world is a book that we can read.

  There are, however, for a reader, various modes of traveling. Dante, reader of both Augustine and Virgil, was conscious of the chasm between the affections derived from literary reading and those that should be elicited by the books of God. The Commedia can be understood as the process by which the passage from one to the other is learned: from the intellectual and affective apprehension of Virgil (and the other books in Dante’s library), to the drama of Dante’s own life under the authorship of God. Certainly, for Dante, one of God’s books cannot be read properly without aid of the other: the world and the word mirror one another metaphorically, and though intellectual skill is not enough, and can even be a hindrance to authentic revelation, a practiced reader can acquire the capacity of self-awareness that will allow Dante (as Virgil says to him when he leaves him in the hands of Beatrice) to “crown and miter thee over thyself.”³⁷ Before he emerged from the dark forest, the delights of this earth had more attraction for Dante than the promised delights of Heaven, and even as he mourned the transient body of his Beatrice he failed to read in her mortal ruins the image of her superior beauty after her transfiguration. As Dante the pilgrim advances through the three perceptible realms, the poetic or intellectual image of the world as text becomes more and more concrete, blending the characteristics of both earthly and heavenly beauty, until it takes on what Dante calls “a universal shape”³⁸ and becomes the final metaphor. For Dante, when reaching the promised vision in the Empyrean, after seeing Paradise as a specious succession of Heavens—in the guise of a blessed light, a rose, a wheel within a wheel—the ultimate reality proves to be the image of a book.

  Dante’s pilgrimage is therefore not only an act of material travel, a displacement in space, but also one in time, as in Augustine’s reading of a psalm. Unlike the physical traveler who simply follows the path forward, Dante the pilgrim, like a curious and reflective reader, while moving along the road from the first to the last page, allows himself to go back, to retrace explored territory, to recall, foretell, and associate events past, present, and future, leafing back and forth through God’s writings, where “that which in the universe seems separate and scattered” is “gathered and bound by love in one single volume.”³⁹ It should be noted, however, that Dante cannot read this crowning book, since in the presence of the final vision his verbal skill “seems even less than that of a suckling infant.”⁴⁰ (Two centuries after Dante, Sandro Botticelli was commissioned to illustrate the entire Commedia. He never finished the work. As if echoing Dante’s avowed impossibility to put perfectly into words the divine revelation, Botticelli seems to have recognized the equal impossibility of putting perfectly into images Dante’s concluding words: the last sheet of all, now unfortunately lost, was left blank.)⁴¹

  For Dante’s contemporaries, the image of the reader as traveler carried, by and large, an active and positive connotation. Reading was a beneficial labor, if directed toward the right goal and performed in the right spirit, allowing the intellect to understand what the spirit intuits through love. In this sense, all human beings were meant to be travelers, which is perhaps why, in the biblical tradition, God preferred the offerings of the nomadic herdsman Abel to those of the sedentary crop grower Cain, and punished Cain, after his crime, by forcing him to become a wanderer himself.⁴² But there were many shades to this interpretation. Readers who committed themselves to the exploration of a text had the qualities of an adventurer, an explorer, an intrepid seafarer who could either, like Jason, pursue a worthy cause and bring back home the Golden Fleece⁴³ or, like the Commedia’s Ulysses, pursue a merely reckless goal in a “mad flight”⁴⁴ from which there is no return, condemning himself to burn in Dante’s Hell throughout eternity for his audacity. Travel could also be a punishment, as in the case of the Wandering Jew who, in the medieval legend, is condemned to wander the earth until the Second Coming for having denied Christ rest when he was carrying the Cross past the Jew’s doorstep.⁴⁵ The reader-travelers could be rewarded for their efforts or punished for their gall.

  But, in its most praiseworthy sense, traveling, like reading, was a pilgrimage that mirrored the pilgrimage of human life. It was a journey of purgation, beset by temptation and suffering, but the reward for the upright traveler was the “better place” promised in the Hereafter. As early as the sixth century, the Ecclesiastical Council of Mâcon prescribed for a bishop who had committed murder a fifteen-year penitence of scripture study and, after that, “a pilgrimage for the remainder of his life.”⁴⁶ Reading to cleanse the soul and traveling to cleanse the body were seen as two complementary actions that the sinner needed to perform in order to be saved. Taking as his text Christ’s words in the Gospel of John (14:6), “I am the way, the truth and the life,” Saint Augustine composed a sermon in which he entreated sinners to take the right path. “If they did so, there was assurance for them, since they could run without getting lost! How they are to be pitied when, on the contrary, they hurry on without keeping to the path! It is better to limp along the path than to walk with a steady foot when missing the path altogether.”⁴⁷ Already in an earlier sermon, Augustine had noted: “Our spirit has two feet—one of the intellect and one of the affect, or of cognition and love—and we must move both so that we may walk in the right way.”⁴⁸ In the first canto of the Inferno, Dante tells the reader that, after emerging from the dark forest, he walked along a desert strand, “the right foot always the lower.”⁴⁹ Countless commentaries have attempted to explain this limping foot, but it may simply be that Dante, a thorough reader of Augustine, remembered the sermon and translated it into the circumstances of his pilgrimage, in order better to allegorize his journey and also to suggest to the reader that a slow perusal of the poem “in the right way” is better than reading quickly but “missing the path altogether.” This is the explicit warning that Thomas Aquinas gives Dante in the Heaven of the Prudent: to think carefully and go through his words step by step. “And let this ever be as lead to your feet, / To make you move slowly, like a tired man.”⁵⁰ A pilgrim, like a reader, must advance gradually.

  “Dante is a pilgrim, Ulysses an explorer,” noted a celebrated Dante critic.⁵¹ Dante, glossing one of his own sonnets, explained that “pilgrim can be understood in one of two ways, one broad, the other restricted: in a broad sense, pilgrim is anyone who is far from his homeland; in a restricted sense, pilgrim only means he who travels toward the House of Saint James [the sanctuary of Saint James of Compostela].”⁵² Dante, who wrote his Commedia in exile, must have known in what broad sense he was himself a pilgrim. He must have felt the proximity between his itinerant life and his itinerant reading, and known the bitterness (as he says in the Commedia) of eating “alien bread tasting like salt” and of climbing “up and down alien stairs.” “I have wandered like a beggar through virtually all the regions to which this tongue of ours extends,” he says in the Convivio,⁵³ reading his way through Italy. During the twenty long years of exile, until the last day of his life, Dante’s library consisted of the few books he dragged with him from one refuge to another, to which were occasionally added the ones his hosts would lend him—a changing collection that reflected the different stages and experiences of the various sites of his banishment.

  Augustine had noted that reading was a
form of travel, “not of places but of affections.”⁵⁴ For Dante it was both. Reading was for him the literal exploration of the geography of his elected authors—Saint Augustine’s Rome and Carthage and the Celestial Jerusalem, Statius’s Ethiopia, Virgil’s Italy, the otherworldly realms of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure—together with their overlaid cartography of affection and experience. There was perhaps a point, toward the end of his life, when Dante no longer knew whether his Commedia was an intricate map of his life or whether his life was a hesitant sketch for his Commedia. Many a reader feels the same.

  The journey that reading offered Dante (and Augustine and Bonaventure) was one of preparation, of comparison, of awareness, a journey measured by what Augustine called “the particles of sand in the glass of time,” at the end of which God might at last open the pages of his book. It is Christ, Augustine acknowledges, addressing God himself, who “is your Word. ... In him the whole treasury of wisdom and knowledge is stored up, and these are the treasures I seek in your books.”⁵⁵ Perhaps, for the right reader, almost any book holds this promise. Perhaps the journey that true reading offers can lead to this treasury, to the “ultimate good” that Aristotle and his Christian interpreters, such as Dante, saw as the end of all human purpose, even before the soul’s journey to rejoin the godhead after the last breath is drawn.

  Not so, argued Saint Bonaventure, skeptical about the success of any reading journey that did not entail the agonies of true faith. A generation before Dante’s, in a short treatise entitled The Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure concluded that it is not through “studious reading” that the mind reaches divine revelation (that is to say, “how such things come about”) but through “prayerful groaning.” Not the journey of life, but the journey’s end will grant us understanding. “Let us die, then,” he says, “and pass over into darkness.”⁵⁶ Saint Augustine, too, reaches this realization that reading is useless for fully apprehending either the Book of the World or the Book of the Word. These volumes are ultimately inscrutable. And Dante, at the end of his Commedia, echoes Saint Augustine’s words: “How short-reaching my words, and how faintly / Do they reflect my purpose! Compared to what I saw / It barely is enough to call it scarce.”⁵⁷ For Bonaventure, for Augustine, for Dante, reading serves the purpose of helping the pilgrim along the road of revelation, pricking his curiosity and his conscience, up to the page before last. There its usefulness must stop, because, as occurs in any text we call great, the ultimate understanding must escape us. We have arrived, but at a place so unknown that no words exist to describe it.