This is lecture 4 of 4 in my Dante Miniseries. This lecture builds on:
“How Dante Became a Medieval Prophet” (1/4);
“If I make my bed in Sheol: The Tragedy of Hell and the Center of the Heart” (2/4);
and
“Purgatorio: In Search of a Clean Heart” (3/4).
In the meantime, I have to share a moving anecdote about teaching Dante to my college students here in Florence. When I teach, I explain to my students, I imagine myself teaching future forty-year-olds; that is, my hope is not just that my students learn facts and dates, but that they get some of the color and fire of what we’re studying—in this case, Dante—into their long-term memories, into their imaginations, and into their hearts.
In light of that goal, in addition to the more usual assignments—like papers and quizzes—I’ve been experimenting over the past couple of years with some more creative ways of getting what we do into the students’ hearts. And so, for this spring’s midterm assignment, I let the students choose from this list:
Midterm Project. Choose one of the following:
1) write out your favorite passage from Dante (at least thirty lines) in your best calligraphy and decorate the page as if it were a medieval illuminated manuscript.
2) memorize your favorite speech (in Italian or in English) from Dante and recite it to instructor (at least twelve lines).
3) invent a new character who should be included within the Comedy. Write an imaginary conversation—based on the Comedy—in which the pilgrim has a conversation with your character.
4) find a work of art in a museum in Siena, Assisi, or Florence (Uffizi, Santa Croce, San Marco, etc.) that was made within one hundred years of Dante’s birth or death. Explain how its style helped you come to understand something in Dante’s poetry.
That was the experiment, but I had no idea how moving this assignment would be!
To begin, a group of eight students decided to memorize portions from Dante, and we had a little recitation party. They all chose different passages, passages which had spoken to them. One student chose Dante’s creative recycling of the “Our Father” from Purgatorio 11; one student recited lines about those who never fully chose and thus never fully lived (from Inferno 3); one student chose the beautiful lines that come toward the beginning of Purgatorio 1:
All of these students, armed with the enthusiasm, optimism, and vigor of youth, have been traveling all over Italy and Europe, every weekend, from the time they arrived. Some have gone to far-away places, like Ireland and Denmark, and others have gone to hike the Cinque Terre, gone to see Taormina (in Sicily), or gone to swim off of the Amalfi Coast. Hearing my student recite these lines—into which I had poured my heart to get just-right music—was deeply moving, in part because I could imagine her being on the Italian coast, looking out at what she saw, being struck by its beauty, and then reaching down inside to pull out this line: “sweet color of oriental sapphire!”
Some students made imaginative additions to Dante’s characters (one student allowed her Dante to speak with a pre-fallen Satan, a still-beautiful Lucifer). And still other students made their own hand-written manuscripts. Again, it was a delight to see how each student had been inspired by a different passage of Dante. Some were haunted by Dante’s description of the “sullen,” those souls among the wrathful who always complained, were always unhappy, despite being able to enjoy God’s gift of life. In Inferno 7, we find them under muddy water, gurgling out hymns:
Another student was moved by Dante’s heart-breaking simile from the beginning of Purgartorio 8:
One student included an image of Dante’s whole mountain;
Still others were moved by Dante’s “Our Father” or the “dark wood” (from Inferno 1); and more than one student couldn’t get Ulysses’s speech out of their minds:
In sum, the project reminded me of how Robert MacFarlane described the same experience:
“During the solitary months and years spent writing a book, it can be easy to forget that it will—if you are lucky—live a social life: that your book might enter the imaginations and memories of its readers and thrive there, that your book might be crammed into pockets or backpacks and carried up mountains or to foreign countries, or that your book might be given by one person to another. Perhaps the aspect of authorship I cherish most are the glimpses I get of how my books are themselves carried, or are themselves given. When I sign books after readings, people frequently want their copies inscribed as gifts. Would you make this out to my mother, who loves mountains? … to my brother, who lives in Calcutta? … to my best friend, who is ill? … to my father, who is no longer able to walk as far as he would wish …?
“As I work on this essay, over the Christmas of 2015, I know that a copy of my book The Wild Places is being sledge-hauled to the South Pole by a young Scottish adventurer called Luke Robertson, who is aiming to become the youngest Briton to ski there unassisted, unsupported and solo. Robertson’s sledge weighs seventeen stone, and he is dragging it for thirty-five days over 730 miles of snow and ice, in temperatures as low as -50°C, and winds as high as 100 mph. Under such circumstances every ounce counts, and I felt impossibly proud when I found out that The Wild Places (paperback weight: 8.9 oz) had earned its place on his sledge, and impossibly excited at the thought of my sentences being read out there on the crystal continent, under the endless daylight of the austral summer” (Robert MacFarlane, “The Gifts of Reading”).
