In a Dark Wood

A Classic Poem from an Italian Masterpiece that Reflects My Current State of Mind

I’d like to welcome and thank my newest paid supporter and out newest bluestocking Cherri Brewer. Support like yours helps me grow and develop Bluestocking Bombshells and out salon.

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Bluestockings who follow me on Notes know that on Sunday night I had a meltdown. My medical debt on top of hounding calls from medical debt collectors got to me.

Does not help that my husband’s insurance barely covers anything. We have insanely high co-pays and an astronomical deductible that.we are not even close to meeting for this year despite the costs of my medications, check-ups, and Covid care. I am a human being; human beings can only take so much stress and demoralization.

I just finished Dante’s The Inferno with my English 102 Great Books students a few weeks ago. This phenomenal epic poem's first canto and opening tercets from the Hollander translation that my class and I used shows where my mind resides this week.

Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
Canto I

 Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

 But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,

 looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night
I spent in such distress, was calmed.

 And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shore
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

 so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass
no mortal being ever left alive.