Curiosity

As these encounters in the Commedia suggest, the conviction that the human will can be stronger than the circumstances to which it is subjected enhances the belief in human freedom and equality. Oppression is always an oppression through symbols as well as through material actions, and every revolution is a struggle to gain control over those symbols. "The oppressed group," says Lerner, "while it shares in and partakes of the leading symbols con­trolled by the dominant, also develops its own symbols. These become, in time of revolutionary change, important forces in the creation of alternatives."¹¹ Symbolically, Constanza's and Piccarda's ordeals are conflicts between the female will and the will of the dominant men, and in the dogmatic frame within which the Commedia inscribes itself they reflect the larger symbol of the male Trinity. In this symbolic context, however, Dante sets up a personal female trinity that lends power to Piccarda's and Constanza's configurations. The singing of the Ave Maria, the words with which the angel Gabriel greets Mary to announce that she is the bearer of the Messiah in the Gospel of Luke (1:28), places the female divine presence at the cusp of the discussion on free will, the power that makes all human beings equal. Dante, the male protag­onist, is saved through the intercession of three female figures: the Virgin Mary "who takes pity / on this [Dante's] impediment"; Saint Lucy, instructed by Mary to help "your faithful one" (faithful because Dante is devoted to Saint Lucy); and Beatrice, whom Lucy seeks out, and asks, "Why don't you rescue one who loved you so?"¹² The saving vision will be granted to Dante by God the Father, by Christ, and by the Holy Spirit, but his salvation itself is devised by the three holy women.

In our time, the symbolic separation of genders is effected not through theological dogma but through the daily instruments of social interaction. Before audiovisual games and activated screens that respond aloud to a child's questions, there were music boxes and talking dolls, dogs that barked, and clowns that giggled. Pull a cord, turn a key, and the toy came to life with sounds that carry meaning. The first talking dolls said things like "Hello," "Play with me," and "I love you." Later, toy soldiers too were given their voice: "Fight!" "You're brave!" "Attack!" Unsurprisingly, toys were made to speak with conventional tags that corresponded implicitly to what was deemed proper for either a boy or a girl. (Sometime in the 1980s, a group of feminist activists purchased a number of talking Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes, exchanged their sound boxes, and returned them to the store. Customers who bought the doctored toys found that when their children activated the doll's voices, G.I. Joe would whine in girlish tones, "I want to go shopping!" while Barbie growled ferociously, "Kill! Kill! Kill!")¹³

These symbolic representations of gender don't grant equality to the sexes. In most of our societies, as is apparent in the defining symbolic language, only the dominant, male sex has existential reality. Grammar confirms this. In French and Spanish, for example, in a sentence where the plural subject is composed of masculine and feminine elements, the masculine is always priv­ileged. "If you speak of a hundred women and one pig," the poet Nicole Brossard has remarked, "the pig has the upper hand."¹⁴

Female identity, outside the roles assigned by society to women, lacks a vocabulary, even in momentous historical events which supposedly redefine "humanity as a whole." A notorious example of this can be found in some of the fundamental texts of the French Revolution.

The revolutionaries by and large believed that in spite of the particular cultural and political characteristics of every society, all human beings have the same fundamental needs. Taking as their premise the notion of universal "nat­ural rights" described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality, they sought to define these rights in the context of the new society. The duties of man, Rousseau had argued, are not dictated by reason alone, but by self- preservation and compassion for his fellow men. Consequently, a society, composed by men with equal duties and rights, had the right to choose its own form of government and its own system of laws. In this context, indi­vidual freedom is not based on tradition or historical hierarchies but on the law of nature: man was free because he was human. The French Revolution, declared Robespierre, "defends the cause of humanity." The particulars of this defense were set down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen}⁵

The Declaration was a document long in the making. The original ver­sion, consisting of seventeen articles that were adopted by the National As­sembly in August 1789, became a preamble to the Constitution of 1791. Later, with some alterations and abbreviated as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it was used as the preamble to the Constitution of 1793, and later still, expanded as the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen, to that of 1795. The Declaration (like the Revolution itself) had "only one principle: that of reforming abuses. But as everything in this dominion was an abuse, it resulted from it that everything was changed."¹⁶

The discussions leading up to its formulation were long and complex. Two sides confronted each other in the debate: the counterrevolutionaries who feared the destabilization of the political, social, and moral order and the ideologues, led by the philosophers who defended a utilitarian theory of society. Some thirty "declarations" were discussed preceding the adoption in 1789, most of them keyed to the prevention of more urban and rural violence, and a new "plague of despotism." The majority of the group agreed with the leader of the French Protestants, Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, that the lan­guage of the Declaration should be of "such lucidity, veracity and directness in its principles . . . that everyone should be able to grasp and understand them, that they might become a children's alphabet taught in schools."¹⁷

The most eloquent of the debaters was the abbe Sieyes. All men, argued Sieyes, are subject to needs and therefore constantly desire comfort and well- being. When in nature, men succeed through their intelligence in dominat­ing the natural world for their benefit. But when they are in a social setting, their happiness depends on whether their fellow citizens are seen as means or obstacles. Relations between individuals, therefore, can take the form of war or of reciprocal utility. The former Sieyes deemed illegitimate because it de­pended on the power of the strong over the weak. The latter, instead, led to cooperation between all citizens and transformed social obligations from a sacrifice to an advantage. Consequently, the first right of an individual must be "ownership of his person." According to Sieyes, "every citizen has the right to remain, to go, to think, to write, to print, to publish, to work, to produce, to protect, to transport, to exchange, and to consume." The only limitation to these rights was infringement on the rights of others.¹⁸

But the universality of these rights was undoubtedly not universal. The first distinction established in the Declaration, between French citizens de­serving civil rights and others who did not, was between the "active" and "passive" male members of society. The Constitution of 1791 defined "active citizens" as all men over the age of twenty-five who possessed independent means (they could not be in domestic service). Property, represented by land, money, and social condition, was deemed the defining feature of citizenship. After 1792 a citizen was defined as a man over twenty-one who earned his living, and owning property was no longer a requisite. But though the distinc­tions between rich and poor, aristocrats and plebeians were seemingly aban­doned, the difference between the sexes was deemed natural and persisted. The chief procurator of the Commune of Paris, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, arguing against the right of women to take on a political role, put the ques­tion as follows: "Since when is it permitted to give up one's sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandon the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places and take part in harangues in the galleries or at the bar of the Senate? Is it to men that Nature entrusted domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to feed our children?" To which the marquis de Condorcet, mathematician and philosopher, responded: "Why would beings exposed to pregnancies and temporary indispositions be un­able to enjoy the rights that no one has ever imagined to deprive others that suffer from gout every winter and fall easily prey to colds?"¹⁹

The Revolution granted women certain rights, allowing them to divorce and to administer some of the conjugal property, but these rights were later restricted under Napoleon and revoked by the Bourbons. The Convention of 1893 declared that "children, insane individuals, women, and those con­demned to degrading penalties" would not be considered citizens of France.²⁰ According to the revolutionaries, natural rights did not imply political rights. But there were those who disagreed. Two years after the original Declaration, in 1791, a forty-three-year-old playwright, Olympe de Gouges, published Dec­laration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen to complete what she saw as a faulty and unfair founding document.

Olympe de Gouges was born in Montauban in 1748. To satisfy conven­tion, on her birth certificate her father appears as Pierre Gouze, butcher of Montauban, but she was assumed to be the illegitimate daughter of a medi­ocre man of letters, the marquis Le Franc de Pompignan, and Anne-Olympe Mouisset. All her life she would idealize the absent marquis, to whom she attributed an "immortal talent." Her contemporaries did not share her high opinion of Pompignan: the aristocratic disdain he showed towards his social inferiors and his indifferent literary style earned him the mockery of Voltaire, who said of Pompignan's Sacred Poems that they merited the epithet because "no one would dare touch them."²¹

She was married at sixteen to a much older man ("whom I didn't love, and who was neither rich nor nobly born"), who died when she was twenty. Refusing to be called the Widow Aubry after her husband's death, as custom dictated, she invented for herself a name made up of one of her mother's Christian names and a variation on her surname. She aspired to be a play-

Olympe de Gouges, 1784 (Musee Carnavalet, Paris). (iNTERTOTo/Alamy)

wright, but since she was illiterate, like most women of her time who were not brought up in privileged circles, she first had to teach herself to read and write. In 1870, she left Montauban for Paris. She was thirty-two years old.²² Almost everyone tried to discourage her from pursuing a writing career. Her father, the old marquis, while refusing to acknowledge her as his daugh­ter, also tried to dissuade her from becoming a playwright. In a letter ad­dressed to her shortly before his death, Pompignan had this to say: "If per­sons of your sex become logical and profound in your writings, what will we become, we men, who are today so shallow and insubstantial? Farewell the superiority of which we were so proud! Women will dictate to us. . . . Women may be allowed to write, but they are forbidden, for the sake of a happy world, to undertake the task with any pretensions." Nonetheless, she per­sisted, and wrote over thirty plays, many now lost, but several of which were performed by the Comedie frangaise. So convinced was she of her dramatic talents, boasting that she could write a full-length play in five days, that she challenged the most successful playwright of the day, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro, to a writing duel, because he had said that the Comedie frangaise should not perform plays written by women. If Gouges won, she promised to use the money as a dowry to enable six young women to marry. Beaumarchais did not bother to reply.²³

In her plays, but also in her political tracts, Olympe de Gouges fought for that elusive universal equality vaunted by the revolutionaries. She pleaded for the rights of women as well as men, and also against slavery, arguing that the prejudices that allowed blacks to be bought and sold were only the justi­fications of greedy white merchants. Slavery was finally abolished by a decree of the Revolutionary Assembly on 4 February 1794; almost fifteen years later, an honor roll was compiled of the "Courageous Men Who Argued or La­bored for the Abolition of the Slave Trade." Olympe de Gouges was the only woman listed.²⁴

Unlike other revolutionary women such as the ardent Girondin Ma­dame Roland, Gouges maintained that women should have a political voice and be given a place in the Assembly. Whereas Madame Roland had meekly declared, "We don't want another empire than that governed by our hearts, and another throne than that within your hearts," Gouges had argued, "Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they should also have the right to mount the tribune." The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who recorded these words, at the same time dismissed Gouges as a "hysterical" woman who changed her political position according to her mood: "She was a revolutionary in July 1789, she became a royalist on 6 October after seeing the king made prisoner in Paris. Having then turned republican in June '91, under the impression that Louis XVI had fled and was guilty of treason, she bestowed him again to her favor when he was taken to court."²⁵

The Declaration ofthe Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen counters Michelet's misogynistic judgment. It is a document that not only amends and supplements its male counterpart; it adds to the civic liberties listed in the Declaration ofthe Rights of Man the rights of all individuals, proposing, among other things, the recognition of illegitimate children, legal aid for unwed mothers, the right to demand recognition from the biological father, the pay­ment of alimony in case of divorce, and the replacement of marriage vows with a "social contract" that legally recognizes the status of both married and unmarried couples, a forerunner of today's contracts of civil union. Gouges's proposal that all children, whether legitimate or not, be given the right to inherit, had to wait until 1975 to be made a law in France. Perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, Gouges dedicated her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen to Queen Marie Antoinette. It was not a wise decision.

Olympe de Gouges was neither a brilliant playwright nor a profound political theorist; she was a woman who was concerned about a declaration of social equality that was visibly disproved by the facts. To the rules and regula­tions devised by the lawmakers of the Revolution, Gouges brought her emo­tional criticism, pointing out their deficiencies and arguing not from a judicial point of view but from a political one, as a conscientious, feeling individual.

In her pamphlets and her speeches, she unwisely expressed sympathy towards the Girondins, a party made up of different factions that had sought the end of the monarchy but resisted the ever-growing violence of the Revo­lution and whose only common stand was their opposition to the Jacobins in power, who supported a centralized government. To punish her, the Jaco­bins ordered that she be stripped and flogged in public. (This was a common procedure against rebellious women: at about the same time, Theroigne de Mericourt, another revolutionary, was publically whipped and then locked in the insane asylum of La Salpetriere, where she died ten years later, having lost her mind because of the brutal treatment she received.) One afternoon, Gouges was attacked in the street as she was coming out of a shop, and her assailant, tearing her dress and grabbing her by the hair, cried out to the mob: "Twenty-four sols for the head of Madame de Gouges. Who'll bid?" To which she calmly replied, "My friend, I bid thirty and I claim preference." She was released amid the laughter of the crowd.²⁶

Eventually her Girondin sympathies led to her arrest, under the pretext of having printed a subversive poster that appeared in her name. In the fierce summer of 1793, she was detained on the third floor of the infamous Mairie, close to the Palais de Justice. She had a wound in her leg, was running a fever, and had to lie in a lice-infested room for a fortnight, during which time she managed to write a number of letters arguing her case and pleading for mercy, constantly watched over by a gendarme. After her trial, where she was given no real chance to defend herself, she was transferred to other prisons, and finally to the Conciergerie, to the cell reserved for women condemned to death. As a last resort, she claimed to be pregnant because pregnant women were excepted from the guillotine. Her claim was rejected, and the execution was announced for the morning of 3 November; because it was raining, it was postponed until the afternoon. One of the many anonymous witnesses of her death said later that she had died "calm and serene," a victim of Jaco­bin ambition and of her intention "to denounce the villains."²⁷

Olympe de Gouges's determination to seek equality for all was not mere self-serving. Injustice is, or should be, a universal concern, and the gender of those who fight for it should not be a consideration in the argument. "We are ministers of God on earth," says Don Quixote, "and arms through which His justice is executed."²⁸ Olympe de Gouges would have agreed. Inequality may be principally caused by the efforts of one sex to defend its social or political power, but equality is not a question of gender.

Almost all of us, even those of us who commit unforgiveable atrocities, know, like Socrates and Don Quixote and Gouges and Dante, what justice and equality are, and what they are not. What obviously we don't know is how to act justly on every occasion, individually or collectively, so that we are all treated with justice and equality as citizens and as persons in the society we call ours. Something in each of us draws us toward seeking material and self-satisfying benefits without consideration for our neighbors; an opposite force draws us to the subtler benefits of what we can offer, share, render use­ful to our community. Something tells us that though ambition for riches, power, and fame can be a strong drive, experience of ourselves and of the world will end up proving that in itself such an ambition is worthless.

In The Republic's final pages, Socrates says that when the soul of Odys­seus was asked to choose a new life after his death, "leaving aside his ambi­tion with the memory of his previous labors," from all the possible heroic and magnificent lives at his disposal, the legendary adventurer chose the life of "a common and unencumbered man," and "he chose it joyfully."²⁹ It is possible that this was Odysseus's first true act of justice.

т$, щ

i ШШо

TT

What Is an Animal?

In my childhood, there were few animals. There were giant tor­toises creeping over the dunes in the park in Tel Aviv where I was taken sometimes to play. There were sad animals in the Buenos Aires zoo, their many shapes matched in the biscuits we'd buy to feed the ducks and swans. There were the animals of the Noah's Ark I'd been given for one of my birth­days made out of papier-mache. It was only much later, as an adult, that I got a dog.

The relationship we have with an animal questions both our identity and that of the animal. Of what consists this relationship? Is it established only through our will or is it determined by the nature of the animal? I know how I feel about and react to the presence of an animal, but how does the animal feel about and react to me? My language has not the elements (except perhaps metaphorically) to express the nature of the other side of the rela­tionship, a side which certainly exists but which I cannot define. Literature is no clearer: Odysseus's dog, which dies at the feet of his returned master in the Odyssey; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, which changes as his mistress changes in Virginia Woolf's Flush; Bill Sykes's dog, which betrays his master

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil see Cerberus attacking the gluttonous under a storm

of hail, foul water, and snow. Woodcut illustrating Canto VI ofthe Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University)

out of faithfulness in Dickens's Oliver Twist; the beaten dog of Meursault's neighbor whose death causes his owner such anguish in Camus's The Outsider— all are defined through the translation of their actions into the emotional vocabulary of their human companions. But how to speak explicitly from the other bank of the species divide?

I have had two dogs in my life (though the verb "to have," implying possession, is an epistemological blunder). The first dog, named Apple by my son in the days before computers became commonplace, was a clever mongrel, impatient, playful, and vigilant, keen to socialize with the other dogs in our Toronto park. The second, Lucie, is an intelligent, gentle, loving Bernese mountain dog who lives with us in France. Both dogs changed me: their presence forced me to consider my own self beyond the limits of my interior world without falling into the social rituals required in human inter­action. There are rituals, of course, but they are superficial, disguising a cer­tain nakedness that I experience when I am with my dog. In her presence, I feel an obligation of sincerity with myself, as if the dog looking into my eyes were a revelatory mirror of some instinctual buried memory. Barry Lopez, speaking of that ancient relative of the dog, the wolf (the same wolf that for Dante was the symbol of all vices), says that "the wolf exerts a powerful in­fluence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you. The Bella Coola Indians believed that someone once tried to change all the animals into men but succeeded in making human only the eyes of the wolf. People suddenly want to explain the feelings that come over them when confronted with their stare—their fear, their hatred, their respect, their curiosity."

Lucie is a good listener. She sits quietly when I read to her from what­ever book I may have at the moment, and I wonder what holds her attention when she hears the verbal flow: the tone of my voice? the rhythm of the sen­tences? the shadow of a meaning beyond the few words she understands? "To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more, there could be things we don't understand,'" says Lopez, "is not to damn knowledge."

Puzzled by his own relationship with his dog, the young Pablo Neruda wrote this:

My dog,

If God is in my verses, I am God.

If God is in your mournful eyes You're God.

And there is no one in this whole vast world, That kneels down to either one of us.

The dog, with all its strength and fierceness, when it comes to bite, if you throw yourselfto the ground, will do you no harm; this, out of mercy.

—Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, 4.5

_E

ach of Dante's encounters with the souls in the Otherworld entails an act of justice humanely set against the final justice of God. At first, Dante is moved by pity for the ordeal of the souls in Hell; as he advances deeper and deeper within it, recognition of God's unquestionable justice overrides his human feelings and, as his own soul slowly awakens, as we have seen, he enthusiastically curses the damned whom God has pun­ished and even takes part in their physical punishment.

Of all the insults and derogatory comparisons Dante uses on both lost souls and evil demons, one recurs throughout. The wrathful, according to Virgil, are all "dogs." From then on, in his travel notes through the kingdom of the dead, Dante echoes his master's ancient vocabulary. Thus, Dante tells us that the wasteful in the seventh circle are pursued by "famished and fast black bitches"; the burning usurers running under the rain of fire behave "like dogs who in the summer fight off fleas and flies with their paws and maw"; a demon who pursues a barrater is like "a mastiff let loose," and other demons are like "dogs hunting a poor beggar" and crueler than "the dog with the hare it has caught." Hecuba's cry of pain is demeaned as a bark "just like a dog"; Dante apprehends the "doglike faces" of the traitors trapped in the ice of Cai'na, the unrepentant Bocca "barking" like a tortured dog, and Count Ugolino gnawing at the skull of Cardinal Ruggiero "with his teeth, / which as a dog's were strong against the bone"; Guido del Duca, in the second terrace of Purgatory, calls the Aretines "snarling curs."¹ There are several more such instances of canine invective. Angry, greedy, savage, mad, cruel: these are the qualities that Dante seems to see in dogs and applies to the inhabitants of Hell.

Human qualities, in Dante's cosmic vision, are fashioned in two ways: by divine grace, which distributes these qualities to everything in the universe according to hierarchies of perfection, and by the influence of the heavenly bodies, which mellow or deepen or even change them. This influence, as Carlo Martello explains to Dante in the Heaven of Venus, can alter heredi­tary traits, so that children often will not follow in their parents' footsteps.² These qualities, once given, are dependent for their effects on our individual will: we are all morally responsible for our actions. We choose how to employ our anger, ruled by the planet Mars, for just or merely selfish goals; we decide whether our violence, also under the influence of Mars, will be directed against the enemies of God or against his work.

Theology and astrology, as well as astronomy, were considered in Dante's time worthy sciences that allowed us better to understand our purpose as willed by God and ruled by Mother Church. Astrology was deemed a neces­sary and practical instrument of ecclesiastical discernment: in 1305, for ex­ample, the cardinals assembled in Perugia greeted Clement V, recently elected in France to the papal throne, with the pronouncement: "You who will safely occupy Saint Peter's chair and shine with a radiant light . . . for [now] each of the planets has a great force in its own house."³ Astrology vouched for Clement as the right choice.

According to medieval cosmogony, human beings are molded, in part at least, by the influence of planets and fixed stars, those that form the constel­lations of the zodiac and other, lesser stellar formations, since all the heavenly bodies, as Dante reminds us, are moved by the all-determining divine love.⁴ Among these lesser constellations that affect our conduct are three that tra­ditionally bear the name of dogs: Canis Major, Canis Minor, and the Canes Venatici (hounds of Venus). Though they are not mentioned by name in the Commedia, the third one, the Canes Venatici, is present by implication. Be­fore arriving in the Heaven of the Moon, Dante warns his readers that from this point on, they will have difficulty following him, since, unlike himself, they lack the help of the gods: "Minerva fills my sails, Apollo leads me, / and the nine Muses point me towards the Bears." The constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major) is depicted in most cosmographical charts as pursued by two greyhounds, Venus's hunting dogs, a northern hound named Asterion and a southern one named Chara. As creatures of Venus they incarnate de­sire, the quest for love both earthbound and sacred. Though it is stated that

Ursa Major and the hounds of Venus, from Johannes Hevelius's Uranographia, 1687. (Photograph © Jay Pasachoff/Superstock)

Dante's ascent through Paradise takes place under his birth sign, Gemini, the entire arrangement of heavenly bodies is revealed to him as he enters the Heaven of Fixed Stars, the sphere whose uttermost north is ruled by Ursa Major, goaded on by the Canes Venatici. These two greyhounds are emblems of that disio, "desire," which in the end is transformed by love.⁵

Perhaps as an echo of these greyhounds of the astrological heaven "in whose revolution it seems / that conditions here below are thought to be changed," the only dog mentioned in the Commedia as the incarnation of positive canine qualities is the veltro, or greyhound, first announced by Virgil at the beginning of their journey and later tacitly invoked by Dante himself: the hound that will one day pursue and kill the evil she-wolf.⁶ The omen is traditional: the emperor Charlemagne, in the Chanson de Roland, sees such a dog in a dream, while Giovanni Boccaccio, in his commentaries on the first seventeen cantos of the Commedia (delivered publicly in 1373), explained that "the greyhound is a breed of dog marvelously inimical to wolves—one of these greyhounds will come 'who will inflict painful death on her [the she-wolf].'" Most commentators identify the greyhound with the emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, much admired by Dante, who called him "the successor of Caesar and Augustus."⁷ In any case, the greyhound is less a dog than the symbol of a hoped-for salvation, a collective or social "disio."

To call a person a "dog" is a common and uninspired insult in almost every language, including, of course, the Italian spoken in Dante's thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany. But mere commonplaces are absent in Dante: when he uses an ordinary expression, it no longer reads as ordinary. When, for example, he uses the conventional "sapphire-blue" to describe the color of the sky (as in the famous line "sweet color of oriental sapphire"), the epithet carries the contradictory meanings of "hard as stone" and "tender as air," as well as the double meaning of oriental,: a gem coming physically from the orient and an emblem of the dawning eastern sky.⁸ The dogs in the Commedia carry connota­tions other than the merely insulting, but overriding them all is the suggestion of something infamous and despicable. This relentlessness demands a question.

Almost all of Dante's books were written in exile, in houses that he could never consider his own because they were not in his Florence, which in his memory he loved and hated as an unfaithful mistress, both praising her for her beauty and scourging her for her sins. The incipit to his poem reveals the double bind: "Here begins the Commedia of Dante Alighieri, Florentine of nationality, not of morals."⁹ No doubt his hosts—Cangrande, Guido Novello, and the others—were kind to him and provided him with comfortable rooms and intelligent conversation, but home was always somewhere else, the place of absence. Banned from Florence, he must have felt that the city's gate might have been a parody of the gate of Hell: its sign would be not "Abandon all hope you who enter" but "Abandon all hope you who leave."¹⁰ And yet Dante, like a whipped dog, was unable to give up all hope of returning home.

The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare remarked that the inhabitants of the Inferno "strangely resemble exiled immigrants, including those of our time. The snippets of their stories, their sentimental effusions, their outbursts of anger, the political news from both sides, their thirst for information, their last wishes, everything seems to come from the same clay and the same peo­ple. The similarity is such that if we were to mingle them, the reader of today would be hard put to distinguish at first Dante's text from the kind of chron­icles or journalistic reports of our present age."^IT

Remembered absence is for every exile, in hell or in a refugee camp, a constant source of pain. "No greater pain," says Francesca in the whirlwind of the lustful, "than to remember happy times / in misery." And the despoiler of Pistoia, Vanni Fucci, questioned by Dante in the serpent-ridden Chasm of the Thieves, as he predicts the sorrows of Florence and the defeat of the White Guelphs makes the intention of inflicting pain explicit: "And I've told you this so that the pain may gnaw you!" Exiles say that their pain comes from a constant feeling of alienation, from living in a place not chosen by them, between walls they haven't erected, surrounded by objects that are borrowed, and in the company of those among whom they are always guests, never hosts. This is the heart of the message delivered by Dante's great- great-grandfather, the crusader Cacciaguida, in the Heaven of Mars, as he describes Dante's (as yet) future banishment:

You will leave everything you love dearest; this is the arrow that exile's bow shoots at the start.

To you the alien bread will taste like salt; you'll see how hard it is to climb up and down unfamiliar stairs.¹²

Exile has the quality of slavery, a state in which nothing belongs to you and you belong to someone else, under the whim of foreign authorities: even your identity is forfeit, subject to your master or benefactor. Exile is a form of loss in which the founding experiences of place and time dissolve into a time and place that exist no more, the memory of which has become some­thing many times removed, a memory remembered, a memory of a memory of a memory, until eventually the dear things lost are nothing but a distant wraith. Perhaps for that reason, the Commedia is a catalogue of losses—loss of Florence of course, loss of all the "undone" dead of Dante's past, loss of masters such as Brunetto Latini, loss of his beloved Beatrice when she dies on earth, loss of his beloved guide when Virgil cannot lead him farther and then of the heavenly Beatrice again and forever in the Empyrean—even the loss of Saint Bernard after the old man at last points Dante towards the ineffable and holy center "beyond / what language shows."¹³ Nothing remains long in Dante's grasp, except the memorable palimpsest which he must now set down for future readers. Because exiles are allowed only one task: transcription.

Exile is a displaced state, but it is also a perverted form of travel in which the impossible goal of the pilgrim is the one place from which he knows he's barred; his is a pilgrimage towards the unreachable. It is hardly surprising that it is in exile, a state in which Dante defines himself in the Convivio as "a bark without sail or rudder," that he dreams his poem of the Otherworld as a cautionary journey through three realms in which he is the absolute for­eigner: a prodigy among the departed souls, a freak still possessing a mortal coil, a body casting a shadow in the eternal realms, a being not yet dead. "That which you tell me about my course, I write," he assures, for instance, Brunetto Latini, but he never says, "When I'm back in Florence once more," as if he knew that he would never see his beloved city again. Cacciaguida had told him, "Your life reaches into the future / beyond the punishment of their perfidious acts." In that future, beyond the present infamy of his fellow citi­zens, there is for Dante the promise of literary recognition but not of return.¹⁴

Eating bread tasting of tears and climbing unfamiliar stairs, Dante must have many times sought living company that was not that of his well-meaning hosts, someone towards whom he didn't have to act with obsequious grati­tude, someone who might distract him from the longing and self-pity. His books and keepsakes (the few that he could carry from place to place), though companionable, merely reminded him of his absent home, and every new object or volume he acquired, like every new experience that came his way, must have seemed a betrayal. How then to bear the slow, relentless reaching into the future of his life, farther and farther away from his dear lost core? Without Virgil, without Beatrice (the icy Beatrice, too forbidding to be am­icable company in any case), without the friends with whom he once roamed the streets of Florence discussing philosophy and poetry and the laws of love, how was he to put into writing the vision now unfolding, how to find an ideal listener for the music he was hearing, a first all-pardoning reader on whom to try out the words and images? In such a state, Dante might have looked at one of his host's dogs.

With the easy nostalgia of the elderly, Cacciaguida reminds Dante that in olden times Florence was sober and modest, and the fashion of the day discreet; women were busy with their children and domestic tasks, and keen on telling exemplary stories about the ancient heroes of Troy and Rome.¹⁵ In Dante's time, in spite of Cacciaguida's criticism, life in most Tuscan households continued to be relatively simple and informal. Depictions of interiors in Florence, Siena, and other Tuscan cities in the thirteenth century show sparsely furnished rooms, sometimes decorated with a few tapestries and trompe-l'oeil paintings, often with colorful vases full of flowers. Pets were common. Birds hung in cages by the window, as shown in frescoes by Masaccio and Lorenzetti. Cats snuggled up by the fireplace in the bedroom. (The Florentine Franco Sacchetti advised men rising naked from the bed to make sure that the cat wouldn't mistake "certain pendulous objects" for playthings.) Even geese were sometimes kept indoors; Leon Battista Alberti, in Il libro della famiglia, recommends the use of geese to keep watch over one's house.¹⁶ And, of course, there were dogs.

Dogs curled up at the foot of the bed or on the floor by the hearth; dogs watched by the threshold or waited for scraps under the table. Lapdogs kept the ladies company by the spinning wheel, and greyhounds waited patiently for their masters to go hunting. Brunetto Latini noted in his Livre du tresorthat dogs loved humans more than did any other animals; only dogs born from the union of bitches and wolves were wicked. Most dogs were faithful unto death: it was not uncommon for dogs to guard their master's corpse day and night, and sometimes even to die of grief. According to Latini, the dog is able to understand the human voice. A contemporary of Dante, Pierre de Beauvais, observed in his Bestiary that because dogs lick their wounds to heal them, they are like priests who hear our confessions and heal our sorrows. Isidore of Seville, in the Etymobgies, explained that the dog (canis) received its name be­cause the dog's bark was like singing (canor) the lyrics that poets composed.¹⁷

According to ancient lore, dogs are supposed to recognize angelic pres­ences before humans can see them. The dog that accompanied Tobit's son Tobias on the journey with the angel is one such example (and the only good dog in the whole of biblical literature). Dogs can not only be aware of the

The hound Guignefort unjustly killed by his master, from Johannes Pauli, Schimpf undErnst (Strasbourg, 1535), folio XLVI v°. (Bibliotheque nationale de France)

numinous; they themselves can also be saintly. In the thirteenth century, in the region of Lyon, a greyhound was venerated under the name of Saint Guignefort. According to tradition, the dog Guignefort was left to look after an infant in his cradle. A serpent tried to attack the child, and Guignefort killed it. When the master returned, he saw the dog covered in the serpent's blood and thought that it had attacked the child. Furious, he killed the faith­ful Guignefort, then discovered the infant safe and sound. Vindicated as a martyr, the dog acquired the status of a saint invoked to protect children.¹⁸

In Verona and Arezzo, Padua and Ravenna, Dante sat at his borrowed table, filled with the vision that he wished to put into words and painfully aware that like the forest of the beginning of his voyage, "to say what it was is hard" because human language, unlike a dog, is an unfaithful creature.¹⁹ The vast and overwhelming systems of theology, astronomy, philosophy, and poetry weighed on him and imposed their rules and tenets. His imagination was free to invent, but always within that incontrovertible cosmic structure, always within the assumption of a universal, God-held truth. The unforgiv­able sins, the stages of redemption, the nine heavenly spheres over which the godhead holds absolute rule were his facts; his task was to build with words

persons and situations and landscapes that would allow him and his readers to enter the vision and explore it, as if it were a geography made of wood, water, and stone. Slowly, around the character that bears his name, Dante conjured up his cast: his best-beloved poet, Virgil; the object of his desire, the dead Beatrice; the men and women who inhabited his past; the pagan heroes who inhabited his books; the saints from the church calendar. Also places and scenes: remembered streets and buildings, mountains and valleys, night skies and dawns, workers in the field and in the village, shopkeepers and artisans, farm animals, wild beasts, and especially the birds that flew among the clouds of Florence—all to illustrate, as best he could, what he knew could not be put exactly into a human tongue.

Observations from thirty-odd years of inquisitive life find their place in the vision: the ox licking his muzzle, once glimpsed perhaps somewhere in the Tuscan countryside, serves to portray the usurer twisting his mouth in the seventh circle; the pilgrims Dante saw in Rome the year of the Jubilee coming and going from Saint Peter's seem like the seducers and panderers in Hell who advance in opposite directions; the surprise of being blinded by a sudden mist in the Alps and feeling the sun gradually clearing its way through the clouds is compared to the slow understanding that reaches Dante on the third cornice of Purgatory; the laborer in the vineyard who must make sure that the vine does not dry out in the summer heat is used to depict Saint Dominic in Paradise, diligently called to serve the Lord.²⁰

Overwhelmed by the flood of remembered images, Dante may have looked down once again at the dog. As their eyes met, Dante, for whom every experience was a touchstone for another and every memory a link in an end­less chain of memories, might have recalled a dog (or several dogs) that wan­dered through his parents' house when he was a child, a dog that lay by his side as the five-year-old mourned his mother, and, later, another dog that kept him company as the adolescent Dante watched over the corpse of his emaci­ated father. A dog trotted alongside his bride four years later on the way to the church where the couple was married; a dog witnessed the birth of his first son, Giovanni; a dog sat quietly in a corner when Dante learned that the fleeting and unforgettable Beatrice Portinari had died as the wife of another man. The dog in front of the exiled Dante might have begotten, in Dante's mind, a pack

Hounds in Andrea di Bonaiuto, Allegoria della Chiesa militante e trionfante (Allegory of the Militant and Triumphant Church), detail. (Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, courtesy of the Musei Civici Fiorentini.)

of remembered dogs: Florentine dogs, Veronese dogs, dogs of Venice and of Ravenna, dogs met on weary roads and in filthy inns, a long line of dogs slowly blending, like the changing shapes of the punished thieves in the eighth circle of Hell, from dog into dog into dog, including his host and protector, Can- grande (Big Dog) della Scala, to whom the Paradiso is probably dedicated.²¹ Thomas Aquinas argued that after death, when the soul has left the body, since people would no longer need food, there would be no animals in Heaven. Accordingly, except for a few allegorical beasts—the eagle, the gryphon— Dante's Paradise is devoid of animals of feather and fur. Saint Augustine (who infamously argued that animals do not suffer) suggested that, though dumb animals could not compete with the heavenly beauties, they no doubt contribute to the adornment of our earthly realm. "It would be ridiculous," he wrote, "to regard the defects of beasts, trees, and other mutable and mor­tal things which lack intelligence, sense, or life, as deserving condemnation. Such defects do indeed effect the decay of their nature, which is liable to dissolution; but these creatures have received their mode of being by the will of their Creator, whose purpose is that they should bring to perfection the beauty of the lower part of the universe by their alteration and succession in the passage of the seasons; and this is a beauty in its own kind, finding its place among the constituent parts of this world." Augustine is echoing Ci­cero, who found it absurd that the universe could have been created for any­thing other than man. Could it have been contrived "for the sake of the ani­mals?" asked the aristocratic Roman. "It is no more likely that the gods took all this trouble for the sake of dumb, irrational creatures. For whose sake then shall one pronounce the world to have been created? Doubtless for the sake of those living beings which have the use of reason." In spite of the ever- increasing extinctions, from Augustine's time to ours, there are still 8.7 mil­lion species of "dumb, irrational creatures" on earth, most of which are un­known to us; to this day, barely one-seventh of them have been classified.²² Popular belief had it that the devil would commonly manifest itself as a "dumb, irrational creature": a serpent, a goat, a dog. Nevertheless, several fathers of the church, such as Saint Ambrose in his Hexameron, insisted that we at least learn gratitude from dogs. "What shall I say about dogs who have a nat­ural instinct to show gratitude and to serve as watchful guardians of their mas­ters' safety? Hence Scripture cries out to the ungrateful, the slothful, and the craven: 'Dumb dogs, not able to bark.' To dogs, therefore, is given the ability to bark in defense of their masters and their homes. Thus you should learn to use your voice for the sake of Christ, when ravening wolves attack His sheepfold."²³ Though experience teaches us that most dogs are grateful servants (we expect in animals virtues often lacking in ourselves), gratitude is an aspect of dogs that appears seldom in popular stories. In the twelfth-century fables of Marie de France (which Dante probably read), only one story shows an example of a loyal dog; in all the others they are quarrelsome, envious, gos­sipy, and greedy. It is their greed (as commentators point out) that makes them return to their vomit. Dogs also incarnate rage: for that reason, the three- headed Cerberus of ancient mythology, placed by Dante to guard the circle of the gluttons, "claws the souls, flays and tears them to pieces." There was a superstition in Florence that to dream of a dog, especially one nipping at your heels, was a herald of sickness or even death. Also of birth: Saint Dom­inic's mother, pregnant with the future founder of the Dominican Order, dreamt of a dog carrying a burning torch in its mouth; to confirm the omen, Saint Dominic became the fiery enemy of every heresy, and after his death his order was charged with lighting the flames of the Inquisition.²⁴

Dante's Commedia is one man's vision but succeeds in being universal. Dante's intimate experiences, his convictions, his doubts and fears, his private notions of honor and civic duty are inscribed in a system not of his making, a universe created by an unquestionable God whose terrible love allows the poet an ineffable glimpse of his creation, identical to God's own tripartite person. Once this vision has been achieved, and though the right words to describe it are lacking—"I declare myself vanquished [by the task]," he confesses—it must be put on paper, and the poem must find a form in which language, in all its irritating and magnificent ambiguity, becomes an epiphany for the reader. To achieve this, Dante threads singular instances of poetic grace with avowals of incompetence, moments of revelation with intermissions of igno­rance, the whole within an established, incontrovertible, ideological frame­work that only theology, rather than art or reason, can approximate. Dante the poet may at times disagree with God's system or be bewildered by it, or even, when overwhelmed by feelings of pity and horror, attempt to soften its adamantine severity. But Dante also knows that for his own passage to be justified and his own voice to be heard, the system must stand firm and, as God's poet, he must write "the matter of which I've been made scribe."²⁵ To this framing orthodoxy belong the savage examples of God's judgment, the gratuitous demonstrations of God's mercy, the divine hierarchies of bliss, and the infernal gradations of punishment: all beyond human understand­ing, much as our erratic behavior must be beyond the understanding of dogs.

Even more: for Dante to assert his humanity, God's system must exist be­yond any possibility of understanding: incomprehension must be part of its very substance, like its eternity and its omnipresence, and as majestic as faith in its evidence of things not seen, as it is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Once God's system appears defined by our incapacity to comprehend and our inability to judge, Dante can resort to the powers that constitute, in essence, his poetic identity: an ability to use words both as incantations and as facts, a sensitivity that allows him to share the suffering and the joy of others, a sensibility that makes him capable of reason and of realizing the limits of that reason. To do all this, Dante must choose from the vast mass of experience, and leave aside certain inspiring and illuminating realities. Nowhere in the Commedia are his wife or his children, for example, and these are only a couple of the deliberate absences in a poem that is supposed to hold the poet's whole world. And among the experiences Dante left out, regrettably, is that of the companionable dog.

And yet, not the dog itself but a knowledge of something kind and generous and loyal for which the dog is responsible, something that tries to understand and to follow and to obey, surfaces from time to time in the Commedia. As we have seen, Dante seems incapable of using words only in a literal sense to lend the poem nothing but their commonplace meaning. Dogs and their proverbial irascible nature are indeed used to qualify bestial­ity and infamy in the three realms, but the other, true characteristics of dogs are not altogether absent from the poem.

From the first canto of Inferno to the twenty-seventh canto of Purgato- rio, Dante the protagonist is guided and protected by Virgil, who within the limited capacities of one enlightened not by faith but by intellect teaches his ward to trust his reason, use his memory, and lend meaning to his love. To guide and protect are duties traditionally fulfilled by dogs, but here, in the relationship forged between the lost Christian poet and the poet of ancient Rome, it is the guided one, Dante, who behaves like an errant beast, one of those hounds of Venus that incarnate his disio. And the one who fulfills the guardian functions is Virgil, "my master," as Dante calls him from the start. High on Mount Purgatory, on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, shortly before their leave-taking, Dante describes himself as a goat kept by Virgil the goatherd. "Goat" fits the bucolic scene, but Dante could also have called himself Virgil's hound because throughout their long and perilous journey, it was always Virgil who gave the orders, Virgil who pronounced the right word or made a clear sign, Virgil who praised or reproved Dante's judgment and actions, Virgil who, so to speak, "owned" Dante, having been charged by Beatrice with looking after him until he could be delivered into the holy presence. Virgil's last words to Dante before parting are those a trainer might address to a well-brought-up dog: "Don't wait again for my word or my sign; your judgment is now free, straight and healthy." Dante, who now knows how to behave, enters "the divine grove" of Eden, of which the ancient poets sang when they spoke of the Golden Age. Like the faithful, loving creature he has become, Dante looks once more at his master, who has remained smiling at the grove's edge, and then he turns obediently towards a beautiful lady who will lead him on to his new, expectant mistress.²⁶

The Commedia is a poem of evidences and almost invisible subtleties, of explicit and implicit connotations, of orthodox theology and subversive exege­sis, of rigorous hierarchies and leveling companionships. To construct its un­imaginable edifice, words are borrowed from every available vocabulary, from Latin and Provencal, from common speech and neologistic poetry, from ar­chaic discourse and children's babble, from scientific jargon and the language of dreams—words stripped of their original function and yet echoing ancestral connotations, made to serve and reveal themselves in an almost endless plu­rality of meaning. Every time curious readers believe they are following one strand of the story, they discover a number of other strands underneath, above, and alongside it: every statement is both subverted and reinforced, every image amplified and reduced to its bare essentials. The wood in which Dante first tells us he has lost his way is an ordinary Tuscan wood, but it is also the wood of our sins, and the wood into which Virgil led Aeneas in his own poem. That first wood encompasses all the woods through which Commedia tells its story: the wood of Adam's tree and the wood of Christ's Cross, the wood in which the true path is lost, but also the wood in which the true path can be found again, the wood that leads to the Gates of Hell and the wood above which looms the salutary peak of Mount Purgatory, the wood where the trees hold the living souls of suicides—the shadowy reflection of the luminous wood in the Garden of Eden. Nothing in the Commedia is only one thing. Much as the dark wood is not only a wood, Dante is not only Dante, the dog used to curse the wicked is not only the wicked dog: it is also the poem's hero, the pilgrim poet Dante himself, lost like a stray dog in a wild and threatening wood. From the first lines of the Commedia (the readers suddenly realized with amazement) the dog at Dante's feet, in all its poetic essence, has surreptitiously entered the poem.

12

What Are the Consequences of Our Actions?

I have never fired a weapon. In my last year of high school, one of my friends brought a gun to class and offered to teach us how to use it. Most of us refused. My friend, I later found out, was a member of one of the Argen­tinian guerrilla movements that fought the military government; his father, whom he loathed, had assisted as a doctor at the government-endorsed tor­ture sessions in the infamous Mechanical School of the Navy.

I left Argentina in 1969, the year in which the atrocities began. I left not for political but for purely private reasons: I wanted to see the world. During the military dictatorship, more than thirty thousand people were kidnapped and tortured, and many were killed. The victims were not only active dissi­dents; any relative, friend or acquaintance of a dissident could be detained, and anyone who for any reason displeased the Junta was considered a terrorist.

I returned only once to Argentina during the years of the military re­gime, and while there became aware of the atmosphere of terror that the military had created, but I didn't become part of a resistance group. "During such times of injustice," another friend once told me, "you can do one of two

(Opposite) Virgil and Dante begin the ascent of Mount Purgatory. Woodcut illustrating the Canto IV of the Purgatorio, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

things. You can either pretend that nothing is happening, that the screams you hear next door are the neighbors having a quarrel and that the person who seems to have disappeared is probably on a long and illicit holiday. Or you can learn to fire a gun. There are no other choices." But perhaps be­coming a witness is another choice. Stendhal, who thought that politics was a millstone tied to the neck of literature, compared political opinions in a work of fiction to a gun fired at a concert, implicitly endorsing the third option.

The head of the military government, General Jorge Rafael Videla, jus­tified his actions by saying that "a terrorist is not only someone who carries a bomb or a pistol but also someone who spreads ideas contrary to Western Christian civilization. We defended Western Christian civilization." Such justifications for murder are commonplace: defense of the true faith, survival of democracy, protection of the innocent, prevention of greater losses have all been invoked to justify the killing of others. The British engineer and freelance journalist Andrew Kenny, in an article in the London Spectator, used just such an argument to defend the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed more than 60,000 people instantly and 120,000 more slowly and painfully: "However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese." On a visit to Hiroshima, Kenny admired the Promotion Hall, a four-story block with a small green dome designed by a Czech architect in 1915, which was close to the center of the target. "The atomic bomb," wrote Kenny, "vastly improved it as an aesthetic object, changing it from a mundanely ugly building into a masterpiece of stricken form."

That day in class, seeing the gun in my friend's hand, I too looked upon it as an aesthetic object. I wondered how such a lovely thing had come into being. I asked myself (like Blake observing the tiger) what its maker had imagined when he wrought it, and whether he had justified his intentions to himself; just as I wondered whether the craftsman who so keenly perfected the military's instruments of torture had dreamt of the precise uses to which his work was to be put. I remembered a legendary account of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin being put to death by his own invention during the French Revo­lution; that final act must have fulfilled for Guillotin an artist's wish to know the meaning of his art. I thought that my friend's gun was a beautiful thing if one ignored its use. It reminded me of the skull of a small creature I once discovered in Patagonia, polished by the insects and the rain, with an elon­gated snout and a single gaping socket, like a miniature Cyclops. For the longest time, I kept the skull on my desk as a reminder.

Einstein: But all the same, we cannot escape our responsibilities. We are providing humanity with colossal sources of power. That gives us the right to impose conditions. Ifwe are physicists, then we must become power politicians.

—Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists, act 2

_L

earning as a dog does the rules of faithfulness and obedience is for Dante a long and painful process. At the foot of Mount Purgatory, not knowing what path to take (in the Commedia's Wonderland there are no signposts), Dante and Virgil meet a group of figures coming slowly towards them. These are the souls of those who, up to the moment of their death, refused spiritual obedience to the church, and then repented with their last breath. Because they rebelled against the Chief Shepherd during their lives, they must now remain shepherdless for thirty times the length of their earthly wandering. Virgil, following Dante's suggestion, asks them courteously if they know "where the mountain slopes down / so that it may be possible to ascend."

Like little sheep come edging from the pen One, then two, then three, the others standing there Turning shyly eyes and noses to the ground,

And what the first one does the others do, Huddling up to her if she stands still, Foolish and humble, and not knowing why,

So I saw, moving on towards us, the forerunner Of that fortunate elected flock Modest in appearance, and dignified in pace.¹

Meekly the souls tell Virgil that he and Dante must turn and go ahead of them. Suddenly, one of the flock detaches itself from its companions and asks whether Dante recognizes him. Dante looks carefully and sees that the inquiring soul "was blond and handsome, with a noble look / But one of his eyebrows had been cloven by a blow." Dante, whose memory is, like himself, mortal, denies having met the man. The soul then, pointing to an identifying wound high on his chest, like that made by the Roman lance in the side of the dying Christ, tells Dante that he is Manfred, grandson of the empress Constanza, whom Dante will eventually meet in Paradise.²

Manfred, though he identifies himself to Dante only as the grandson of the empress, was in fact the illegitimate son of Frederick II, the emperor condemned with other Epicureans to the circle of the heretics in the Inferno. (Later, Frederick would become a Romantic hero; in German folklore, he was supposed to have lived on after the hour of his death, thanks to a magic spell, in an underground castle, away from the world, guarded by ravens.)³ The historical Manfred was an ambitious, conniving, ruthless character. He became the leader of the Ghibelline cause, opposing the alliance of the pope with the Guelphs and with Charles of Anjou. On his father's death, he was made regent of Sicily until his half-brother Conrad could take the throne; a few years later, when Conrad died, Manfred assumed the regency on behalf of Conrad's son. In 1258, after a false rumor had announced his nephew's death, Manfred had himself crowned king of Sicily and Puglia.

The newly elected pope, Urban IV, proclaimed him a usurper and placed the crown of Sicily on the head of Charles of Anjou. Branded the antichrist because of his fierce opposition to Rome, Manfred was excommunicated twice, once in 1254 by Innocent IV and once in 1259 by Urban. Seven years later, Charles succeeded in killing his rival at the battle of Benevento and, as a gracious victor, had him honorably buried under a cairn of stones, though in unconsecrated ground. With retrospective rancor, however, the new pope, Clement IV, ordered the bishop of Cosenza to have Manfred's body disin­terred "with tapers extinct" and thrown into the River Verde, which marked the border with the Kingdom of Naples.⁴

Dante's contemporaries were strongly divided in their judgment of Man­fred. For the Ghibellines, he was a heroic figure, a freedom fighter against the tyrannical ambitions of the papacy. For the Black Guelphs, he was a mur­derer, an infidel who had associated with the Saracens against Pope Alexan­der IV Brunetto Latini accused Manfred of killing his father, his half-brother, and two of his nephews, as well as attempting to murder Conrad's infant son. The blond, handsome hero with the cleft eyebrow would later appeal to Byron and Tchaikovsky.

Dante, who sided with the White Guelphs (now associated with the Ghibelline cause), thought of Manfred, the last representative in Italy of the Holy Roman Empire, as a symbolic incarnation of the conflict between em­pire and church, a leader of the opposition to the church's interference in worldly affairs. In Dante's view, the civil powers of the church had demeaned its spiritual endeavors and turned the institution into a vulgar, politicking arena. No less a presence than Saint Peter, Christ's anointed, in the Heaven of Fixed Stars inveighs against the corruption and abuse of the Holy See:

He who usurps my place on earth, My place, my place which is now vacant In the presence of the Son of God,

Has made my burial site a sewer Of blood and stench, which the perfidious Who fell from here above, delights in below.⁵

Empire and church must follow Christ's dictum of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's: Manfred fulfilled the first part of the equation. Just as in the Inferno the soul of Muhammad tears open his chest as a symbol of the schism he has caused among Christian believers ("see how I rend myself," he says to Dante), Manfred's wounded chest is the symbol of the wounds in the body of the empire, an empire nevertheless re­deemed, in the eyes of God, through Manfred's labors. Manfred is, for Dante, the Christian champion who attempted to mend the disastrous effects of the legendary Donation of Constantine.⁶

According to medieval legend, the emperor Constantine on his death­bed ceded the imperial secular rights to the church, limiting the imperial authority and allowing the pope to meddle in civil affairs. (In the fifteenth century, the humanist Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation of Constan- tine was a clever forgery.) Beatrice will later compare Constantine's Donation to a catastrophe as great as Adam's Fall. In spite of what he judges to be the emperor's grievous error, Dante places Constantine in the Heaven of the Just Rulers and, through the voice of the eagle, excuses him because he acted "with good intentions that bore bad fruit."⁷

Manfred is also an example of the limited powers of papal excommu­nication. God's mercy, Dante repeatedly asserts, is infinite, and even a late repentant, uttering his confession with his dying breath, can be saved when he turns "weeping towards Him who willingly forgives." In Dante's time the church attempted to exclude from the pope's anathema the codicil that ac­knowledges God's prerogative of pardoning whoever "in the end repents."⁸ For Dante, absolute curses were intended to advertise the temporal powers of the pope rather than the overriding quality of God's mercy. A true con­clusion to a sinner's life must be not a full stop but an ongoing phrase, an endless questioning of the sinner's own actions, a process of spiritual regen­eration driven by the spirit of curiosity towards a better understanding of the self. To emphasize his argument, Dante compares the wounded Manfred to the risen Christ showing his wound to the doubting Thomas in the Gospels of Luke (24:40) and John (20:27). John Freccero, in an enlightening essay on Manfred's wounds, notes that the Gospel text is "filled with signs that de­mand of the reader the same assent that is demanded of the doubting Thomas. As Christ's scarred body is seen by the disciples, so John's text is read by the faithful." Freccero points out that the same analogy is operative in Dante's poem: "Manfred's wounds, slashed across a body made of thin air, stand for Dante's own intrusion into the course of history. They are, as it were, writing itself, Dante's own markings introduced across the page of history as testi­mony of a truth which otherwise might not be perceived."⁹ Manfred explains himself to Dante in these words:

Horrible were my sins; But infinite goodness has such wide arms That it embraces all who turn to it.

By their curse a soul is not so lost

That the eternal love may not return So long that hope retains a trace of green.

It's true that he who dies scorning the church, Even though he might repent at last Must stay upon the outside of this bank

For thirty times as long as he has lived In his presumption, unless this stern decree Be not made shorter by kind prayers.¹⁰

The story of Manfred is one of wounds and bones. Earlier in the canto, Virgil signifies the hour by noting that it is already evening in Naples where his mortal body lies after it was taken from Brindisi; Manfred explains that his bones might still be under the bridge near Benevento had they not been strewn by the river, washed by the rain, and stirred by the wind. Virgil's bones were dispersed by order of the empire, Manfred's by that of the church; in both cases these were temporary displacements, awaiting the promised Day of Resurrection. In a world in which death by violence was an everyday occurrence, and war not the exception but the rule, the promise of redemp­tion for the repentant sinner, an answer to the prophet's question "Can these bones live?," was of the essence.¹¹

A near-contemporary of Dante's, the French poet Jean de Meung, argued that the violence of war was a contest in which we were all pawns; his version of the story of Manfred presents it in terms of a game of chess. The image is ancient, going back to Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata. In the early- fourteenth-century Welsh epic the Mabinogion, two enemy kings play chess while in a nearby valley their armies clash. At last, one of the kings, seeing that his adversary will not surrender, crushes the golden chessmen to dust. Shortly afterwards, a messenger arrives covered in blood and announces that his army has been slaughtered. So commonplace was the image of war as a game of chess that Charles of Anjou employed it when referring to the forthcoming battle with Manfred at Benevento: he promised to checkmate the miscreant "by moving a pawn which had gone astray in the middle of the chessboard."¹² The Battle of Benevento, fought on 26 February 1266, is the historical

Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Discovery of Manfred's Body After the Battle of Benevento, 1266, 1838. (© DcA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY)

core of Manfred's narrative, and another emblematic episode in the conflict between empire and church. Dante's century had seen several important changes in the art of warfare: increased use of mercenaries, "shock tactics" such as cavalry charges to frighten and scatter the enemy troops, and the deployment of projectile firearms such as bombards, which enabled armies to kill larger numbers of the enemy from a greater distance.¹³ At Benevento, both armies employed mercenary forces, but it was Charles who adopted the shock tactics that proved so successful against the confident Manfred. How­ever, neither side made use of projectiles: traditional weapons were enough to inflict on Manfred the wounds that prevented Dante from recognizing the handsome warrior. A fourteenth-century illumination of the Nuova cronica shows Charles piercing Manfred with his lance (the depiction is of course al­legorical, since we have no historical evidence that this was what happened), while the gash on the eyebrow may have been caused by a sword or by a doloire or ax.¹⁴ Swords, lances, and axes were the armies' common weapons; bombards and other projectile firearms were still fairly rare at the time.

Projectile firearms were probably invented in China in the twelfth cen­tury, and gunpowder some three centuries earlier. (The formula for gunpow­der appears for the first time in a Daoist manual of the ninth century, which warns alchemists not to mix inadvertently the component substances.) Tra­ditionally, Chinese gunpowder was associated with ancient "smoking out" practices, fumigation rituals carried out by law in every home. These prac­tices were used not only as prophylactic measures but also in warfare as early as the fourth century b.c.e. to enable advancing troops to hide behind smokescreens during sieges, as well as to bombard the enemy with toxic fumes produced by pumps and furnaces. In his monumental study of Chi­nese science and civilization, Joseph Needham noted that "a cardinal feature of Chinese technology and science" was "the belief in action at distance." In warfare, this manifested itself in the use of flame-carrying arrows and the so-called Greek fire, incendiary wagons that used as the inflammatory ma­terial a distillation of petroleum (naphtha) first produced in seventh-century Byzantium and probably brought to China by Arab traders.¹⁵

Although bombards did not make their first appearance in Europe until after Dante's death—in 1343 the Moors of Algeciras used them to attack Christian armies—the first European mention of the composition of gun­powder appears in a text by the English scholar Roger Bacon a century ear­lier. "We can," Bacon wrote in 1248, "with saltpeter and other substances, compose artificially a fire that can be launched over long distances. . . . By only using a very small quantity of this material much light can be created accompanied by a horrible fracas. It is possible to destroy a town or an army."¹⁶ Bacon, who entered the Franciscan orders and was a friend of Pope Clement IV, might have learned about gunpowder after witnessing a display of Chinese fireworks, which were brought to Europe by other Franciscans who had been to the Far East.

Ironically, the first European bombards or cannons were constructed by the craftsmen who made the traditional symbols of peace: the bell founders. It is likely that the first bombard was a bell, turned upside down and filled with stones and gunpowder. These early cannons were crude, inaccurate, and dangerous to both users and targets. Nor could they be moved with ease: in the fourteenth century, they were mounted on huge blocks and then dis­mantled when the siege was over.¹⁷

Assault ofMara: detail of a tenth-century mural from Dunhuang, Ginsu Province, showing Chinese demons carrying incendiary weapons.

(© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

Nowhere in the Commedia does Dante speak of gunpowder, but in his description of the chasm in which the traffickers in public offices are pun­ished the Arsenal of Venice is mentioned, depicted not as the place in which warships are built but as a repair shop where damaged boats are caulked in wintertime. It is a center of reparation, not of death-mongering, and it con­trasts with the hideously farcical scene of the traffickers wallowing in boiling pitch, their flesh torn off by the hooks of angry demons.¹⁸

The scene bears on Manfred's story in another way. Here Dante shows himself a cowardly onlooker, comically afraid of what the demonic custodians might do to him. Following Virgil's orders, he hides behind a crag to watch undetected the obscene goings-on until, after negotiating with the demons, Virgil calls him forth:

And my guide said to me: "Oh you that sit Squatting and cowering among the splinters of the bridge, Securely now return here to my side."¹⁹

On other occasions, as when crossing the murky Styx where the wrathful and sullen are punished by being plunged into the putrid mud, Dante had been pleased to watch the torture of the sinners. But among the punished traffickers, Dante's curiosity is different. Now he wants to watch but not be seen, and his voyeuristic enjoyment stems from something undefined and archetypal.

In a story that J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, later told friends, he was greatly influenced by a similar instance of perverted curiosity in Proust's Du cote de chez Swann. He learned by heart the passage in which Mademoiselle Vinteuil goads her lesbian lover to spit on a photograph of her deceased father: "Perhaps she would not have consid­ered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate," Proust notes of Mademoiselle Vinteuil, "had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever names one may give it, is the ter­rible and permanent form of cruelty."²⁰ It is this indifference to the suffering of the traffickers that distinguishes Dante's reactions from earlier scenes.

Oppenheimer has been called a modern version of the Romantic hero, who like Byron's Manfred (but not like Dante's) is unable to repent of his sins and is torn between his urge to explore the forbidden unknown and feelings of guilt for having done so. The son of a wealthy Jewish family that had abandoned its faith, Oppenheimer grew up in New York City in a vast apart­ment where his philanthropic father had accumulated a remarkable art collec­tion. There Oppenheimer grew up among Renoirs and van Goghs, while being instructed by his parents in the obligation to help the less fortunate by funding such organizations as the National Child Labor Committee and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Oppenheimer was a precocious, solitary, questioning child, passionately interested in science, es­pecially chemistry. Mathematics, however, was his weak point, and later, when he became known as a brilliant theoretical physicist, his mathematics, by professional standards, were considered by his colleagues to be less than im­pressive. Like Manfred, the material workings of the substances that made the world interested him more than the abstract rules that governed them.²¹

As a lonely young man, Oppenheimer behaved somewhat erratically. He was sometimes melancholy, refusing to speak or acknowledge the presence of others; sometimes oddly euphoric, reciting lengthy passages of French liter­ature and sacred Hindu texts; a few times he appeared to his friends to be verging on madness. Once, during his year at the University of Cambridge, he left a poisoned apple on his tutor's desk, an affair that was hushed up after his father promised to have his son seen by a psychiatrist. Years later, when Oppenheimer became director of the Los Alamos atomic laboratory, his col­leagues found him unnerving. On one hand, he seemed often lost in his own abstractions, silently aloof; on the other, he submitted without compunction to the supervision of military authorities, even though the Intelligence Ser­vices suspected him of being a Communist spy because of his liberal opin­ions and treated him with little regard. When, after the war, Oppenheimer pleaded for the United States and the Soviet Union to share their technolog­ical knowledge in order to avoid a nuclear showdown, his opponents found in his conciliatory attitude reason enough to brand him a traitor.

The question of how to make a nuclear bomb, that vastly evolved de­scendant of the crude early bombard of Dante's time, presented not merely a theoretical problem but one of engineering as well. Because of the fear that the Germans might develop such a bomb before the American scientists, the construction of the Los Alamos site had to proceed rapidly, even while basic problems of physics were still being solved: the strategies for "action at dis­tance" needed to take shape before the question of what that action was to be was fully formulated. When Brigadier General Leslie Groves chose Op­penheimer for the post of director of the Los Alamos lab, what impressed him most was that this scientist understood, far better than his colleagues, the practical aspects of the problem of how to go from abstract theory to con­crete construction.

The situation changed on 7 May 1945 when Germany surrendered, thus ending the threat of a nuclear attack. In July a petition began circulating among Oppenheimer's colleagues urging the government not to use the bomb "unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender." Oppen- heimer was not one of the seventy signatories to the 17 July petition.²²

The day before, 16 July, the bomb was tested at a site that Oppenheimer had dubbed Trinity. Observing the effects of the controlled explosion behind a protective barrier, Oppenheimer must have looked like Dante behind his crag observing the demonic activity. As the first atomic bomb exploded, un­leashing its famous mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer, as he noted two de­cades later, was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, when the god Vishnu tries to convince the mortal Prince to do his duty, and says to him: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."²³

After the successful test, four Japanese cities were proposed as targets of the bombing: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. It was only a few days before the attack that the final decision was made: because it was the only one that did not have an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, the choice fell on Hiroshima. On 6 August, at 8:14 a.m. local time, the Enola Gay, a plane named after pilot Paul Tibbets's mother, dropped the bomb. Two shock waves followed a blinding glare, Tibbets recalled. After the second one, "we turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall."²⁴

The dichotomy that had struck Oppenheimer so strongly in the Proust passage was apparent in his own life. On one hand, he revered scientific pursuit with the intelligent curiosity that led him to question the intimate mechanics of the universe; on the other, he faced the consequences of such curiosity, both in his personal life, where his self-centered ambition verged on a Manfred-like egotism, and in his public life, where, as a scientist, he be­came the man responsible for the most potent killing machine ever conceived. Oppenheimer never spoke of these consequences in terms of degrees and limits, not to curiosity itself but to the instrumentation of that curiosity.

After the bombing, a Jesuit priest, Father Siemes, who was in the vicinity of Hiroshima at the time, wrote this in a report to his superiors: "The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?" Dante's response is given by the eagle in the Heaven of the Just: God's justice is not human justice.²⁵ One of Oppenheimer's biographers, quoting the Proust paragraph, com­pared it to a statement Oppenheimer made towards the end of his life at a conference that was partially sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Free­dom, an anti-Communist organization founded after the war (and funded by the CIA):

Up to now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely pro­longed adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. . . . It turned out to be impossible . . . for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth . . . and in an attempt to break out and be a rea­sonable man, I had to realise that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.^2,6

So does Manfred. His own views are not enough, he must tell his story to Dante, not only to procure the redeeming prayers of his daughter, the "good Constanza," when the poet returns to earth. Manfred, as symbol and as allegory, as a pawn in the game of history and as lines of verse in an im­mortal poem, needs to know what Dante sees translated into the words of his narrative. In this reflective action Manfred will perhaps feel a redeeming com­passion for the victims, understand the import of his full repentance, and believe in the assurance of his salvation, delivered in spite of his undoubtedly "horrible sins."

13

What Can We Possess?

The concept of money escapes me. As a child, I never felt that there was a real difference between the bills in my Monopoly set and the ones that came out of my mother's purse except in a conventional sense: one lot was used in the games I played with my friends, the other in the card games my parents played in the evening. The artist Georgine Hu would draw what she called "banknotes" on toilet paper and use them to pay for her psychiatrist's consultations.

As a symbol for the value of goods or services, soon after its invention money universally lost its meaning and became merely equivalent to itself: money equal to money. Literary and artistic symbols, instead, allow unlim­ited explorations because the things they symbolize are real. On a literal level King Lear is the story of an old man who loses everything, but our reading does not stop there: the poetic reality of the story is persistent, echoing throughout our past, present, and future experiences. A dollar bill, instead, is only a dollar bill: whether issued by the United States Federal Reserve or produced by a naif artist, it has no reality beyond its paper surface. Philip VI of France said that a thing was worth what he said it was worth because he was the king.

(Opposite) Dante, emerging from the dark wood, is threatened by the three beasts.

Woodcut illustrating Canto 1 of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Georgine Hu, Money Bills (detail). (ABCD: Une Collection d'Art Brut [Actes Sud: Paris, 2000]. Photograph by kind permission of Bruno Decharme.)

Some time ago, a friend savvy in things financial tried to explain to me the truism that the fabulous sums mentioned in national and international transactions don't really exist: they are ciphers taken on faith, supported by abstruse statistics and fortune-tellers' predictions. My friend made it sound as if the science of economics were a more or less successful branch of fantas­tic literature.

Money is "frozen desire," as James Buchan calls it in his extraordinary book about money's meaning: "the desire incarnate" that offers "a reward to the imagination, as between lovers." In our early centuries, Buchan explains, "money seemed to be guaranteed by rare and beautiful meals, of whose inner nature and capacity men could only dream." Later, that guarantee became merely "the projected authority of a community," first of princes, then of merchants, then of banks.

False beliefs engender monsters. A trust in empty symbols can give rise to financial bureaucracies of chance schemes and red-tape regulations, with convoluted laws and fearful punishments for most, devious strategies of ac­countancy and obscene wealth for a happy few. The time and energy devoted to tangling and disentangling the world financial apparatus puts to shame the inventions of Gulliver's Academy of Projects, whose bureaucratic mem­bers work hard at extracting sunshine from cucumbers. Bureaucracy infects every one of our societies, even those of the Otherworld. In the seventh circle of Hell, those guilty of crimes against nature are made to run incessantly, but as Brunetto Latini explains to Dante, "whoever of this flock stops for a moment, must lie for a hundred years thereafter / without fanning himself when the fire hits him." As in most bureaucratic procedures, no explanation is given.

During the economic crisis in Argentina in 2006, when banks like the Canadian Scotiabank and the Spanish Banco de Santander closed overnight and robbed thousands of people of their savings, whole sections of the Ar­gentine middle class were left without their homes and forced to beg in the streets. Obviously, no one believed any longer in the justice of a civil society. To blame for this loss of ideology and of faith in a legal structure were the international financial giants and their policies of quick gain and institutional corruption. Admittedly, it was not difficult to corrupt the upper classes, the military, even the leaders of the workers' unions, to whom smaller or larger handouts were offered de facto in every business transaction. At the same time, the usurers were mindful of not losing their interest. Even after the horrors of the military dictatorship, when it seemed that Argentina had been bled of all its financial and intellectual powers, the usurers made huge profits. Between 1980 and 2000 (according to the World Bank World Development Indicators of 2011), the private lenders to Latin American governments re­ceived $192 billion above their loans. During those same years, the Interna­tional Monetary Fund lent Latin America $71.3 billion and was reimbursed $86.7 billion, making a profit of $15.4 billion.

More than fifty years earlier, during his long regime as president of Argentina, Peron liked to boast that, like Disney's Uncle Scrooge, he could "no longer walk along the corridors of the Central Bank because they're so crammed full with gold ingots." But after he fled the country, in 1955, there was no gold left to walk on, and Peron appeared on international financial lists as one of the richest men in the world. After Peron, the thefts continued and increased. The money lent to Argentina, several times, by the IMF, was pocketed by the same well-known ruffians: ministers, generals, businessmen, industrialists, congressmen, bankers, senators, their names familiar to every Argentinian.

The IMF's refusal to lend more was based on the safe premise that it would simply be stolen again (thieves know one another's habits all too well). This was no consolation to the hundreds of thousands of Argentinians who were left with nothing to eat and no roof under which to sleep. In many neighborhoods, people resorted to bartering and, for a time, a parallel econ­omy allowed them to survive. Like baking and sewing, poetry became a currency: writers would exchange a poem for a meal or an article of clothing. For a time, the improvised system worked. Then the usurers returned.

And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up itself.

—shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.119-24

_H

istorians of the time were less kind to Manfred than Dante was. At the end of the fourteenth century, Leonardo Bruni stressed the fact that Manfred was "the offspring of a concubine who had usurped the royal name against the will of his relations." Manfred's near contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that "he was as dissolute as his father . . . and delighted in the company of jesters, courtiers and prostitutes, and always dressed in green. He was a spendthrift (and) all his life he was an Epicurean who cared nothing for God nor his saints, but only for bodily pleasure."¹ But Manfred's sin, like that of Statius (of whom more later), seems to have been prodigality, not avarice.

Of the three beasts who stand in Dante's path as he attempts to ascend the beautiful mountain after leaving the dark forest the worst, Virgil will tell him, is the she-wolf. The common inspiration for the three beasts is the biblical book of Jeremiah, where they are summoned to punish the sinners of Jerusalem: "Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities; every­one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many and their backslidings are increased" (5:6). But as always in Dante, the creatures he mentions and the places he describes are at once real things and symbols of things that are real. His depictions are never merely emblem­atic: they always allow for the various levels of reading he recommends in his letter to Cangrande in which he expounds his poetic project, saying that his readers should begin with a literal interpretation, followed by the allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystical ones.² And even this multilayered reading is not enough.

The first beast, the leopard or panther, "light and very nimble, covered with a spotted coat," is, according to Latin tradition, like the dogs of desire, one of Venus's familiars, and therefore in Dante's bestiary an allegory of lust, the temptation that assaults us in our self-indulgent youth. The second, the lion, "head erect and with rabid hunger," is not Saint Mark's emblematic beast but stands as a symbol of pride, the sin of kings, which comes upon us in our adulthood. The third is the she-wolf.

And a she-wolf that seemed laden heavily with all cravings in her leanness, and has made many before now live in distress,

she brought such deep sorrow upon me with the terror caused by the sight of her, that I lost all hope of ever ascending.³

Up to this point, Dante's emotions have alternated between hope and fear: fear of the forest followed by the comforting sight of the mountain's glimmering peak; the image of drowning in a high sea, by the sense of being rescued on the shore; dread of the leopard, by the intuition that in the morn­ing light some good might come from meeting the wild beast. But after the encounter with the she-wolf, Dante feels that he can no longer expect to reach the mountaintop in safety. Therefore, just before Virgil appears to guide him, Dante finds himself bereft of hope.

If the sins of the leopard are those of self-indulgence and those of the lion the sins of unreason, the sins of the she-wolf are those of cupidity, the longing for empty things, the pursuit of earthly wealth above all the prom­ises of heaven. Paul's companion Timothy wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows" (1 Timothy 6:10). Dante, on the path of salvation, is threatened by that greedy hunger, tempt­ing him not perhaps with material gain but desire for things that are never­theless of this world—fame that comes through wealth, recognition that comes through possession, the acclaim of his fellow citizens—and these se­cret longings drag him back to the edge of the dark forest and weigh him down so heavily that he feels that he can no longer hope for a spiritual as­cent. Dante knows that he has been guilty of other sins—his youthful lust, which made him turn from the memory of Beatrice to the desire for another woman; the recurrent pride that is never completely absent, even in his con­versations with the dead, until he is shamed by Beatrice in the Garden of Eden. But the sin of the she-wolf is one that threatens not only him but his entire society, even the entire world. To avoid the threat, Virgil tells him, he must take another path:

Because this beast, because of which you cry out, allows no man to pass her way, but so strongly she prevents it, that she kills him;

and has a nature so perverse and vicious, that she never satiates her craving appetite, and after feeding, she's hungrier than before.⁴

But what exactly is this terrible sin of cupidity? No sin is exclusive: all sins intermingle and feed on one another. An excess of love directed towards a mistaken object leads to greed, and greed is at the root of several other vices: avarice, usury, excessive prodigality, overreaching ambition, and, with it all, anger at those who prevent us from getting what we want and envy of those who have more than ourselves. The sin of the she-wolf, therefore, has many names. Saint Thomas Aquinas (once again an unavoidable source for Dante's moral tenets), this time quoting Saint Basil, notes: "It is the hungry man's bread that thou keepest back, the naked man's cloak that thou hoard- est, the needy man's money that thou possessest, hence thou despoilest as many as thou mightest succour." And Aquinas adds that cupidity or covet- ousness, since on the one hand it consists in the unfair taking or retaining of another's property, opposes justice, and since on the other hand it denotes an inordinate love of riches, sets itself above charity. Though Aquinas argues that when covetousness stops short of loving riches more than God it is not a mortal but a venial sin, he concludes that "lust of riches, properly speak­ing, brings darkness on the soul." If pride is the greatest sin against God, covetousness is the greatest sin against all of humankind. It is a sin against the light.⁵

In Dante's cosmology the covetous are located according to degree. In the fourth circle of Hell can be found the avaricious and the spendthrifts; in the sixth, the tyrants who robbed their people and the violent highwaymen who despoiled them; in the seventh, the usurers and the bankers; in the eighth, the common thieves and those who have sold ecclesiastical and pub­lic offices; in the ninth the greatest betrayer of all, Lucifer, who coveted the ultimate power of God himself. In Purgatory the system is reversed (since the ascent leads from worst to best) and new variations and consequences of covetousness are added. On the second cornice of Purgatory the envious are purged, on the third the wrathful, on the fifth the avaricious.

Covetousness is punished and purged in several ways: in the fourth cir­cle of Hell, guarded by Plutus, the god of riches (whom Virgil calls "a cursed wolf"), the avaricious and spendthrifts must push, in large and opposing half-circles, great boulders, which they slam against one another, shouting, "Why do you hoard?" and "Why do you throw away?" Dante notices that a great number of the avaricious are tonsured: Virgil explains that they are priests, popes, and cardinals. Dante fails to recognize any of them, because, says Virgil, "their undiscerning life which has rendered them obscene, / now makes them too obscure for recognition." They mocked, he goes on, the goods that Fortune holds, and now "all the gold that is under the moon, or ever was, could not give rest to a single one of these weary souls." Human beings cannot fathom the wisdom of God that allows Fortune to distribute and redistribute earthly possessions from one person to another, making one rich and another poor in an endless and fluid course.⁶

Avarice is a recurrent theme in the Commedia; the sin of the spendthrifts is not much dwelt upon. The case of Statius is the exception. In Purgatory,

Virgil believes that Statius has been condemned for avarice and asks his fellow-poet how was it that a wise man like Statius could fall prey to such an error. Statius smilingly explains that his sin was the opposite.

Then I realized that our hands could open their wings too wide in spending, and I repented of that as of the other offences.⁷

The subject of prodigality is then dropped, but avarice is pursued fur­ther. Within the mysterious workings of Fortune, there are those who are not only avaricious but try to profit from the misery of others: these Dante meets in Hell three circles below the avaricious. After summoning the winged mon­ster Geryon from the abyss, Virgil tells Dante that while he is giving instruc­tions to Geryon about carrying them down, Dante should speak to a group of people huddled on the edge of the burning sand.

Through their eyes their grief was bursting forth; on this side and that, they attempted to ward off sometimes the steam, sometimes the burning soil;

not otherwise do dogs in summertime using their muzzle or their paw, when they're bitten by fleas, flies or gadflies.⁸

This is the first (and only) time that Virgil has sent Dante on his own to observe a group of sinners, and Dante fails to recognize any of them, as he failed before in the circle of the avaricious. Sitting on the burning sand with their eyes fixed on the ground are the bankers, guilty of the sin of usury: from their necks hang money pouches embroidered with their family arms. One of them, who says he is from Padua, tells Dante that the people surrounding him are all Florentines. The passage is short because it seems unnecessary to dwell on these condemned souls, and Dante treats them with utter scorn. They are like beasts deprived of reason, prisoners of their cupidity. They re­semble the animals depicted on their money bags—a gorged goose, a greedy sow—in their gestures, like a Pisan, seen here by Dante, whose final grimace is to lick his snout like an ox.

Usury is a sin against nature because it finds increase in what is naturally sterile: gold and silver. The activity of usurers—making money out of money— is rooted neither in the earth nor in care for their fellow human beings. Their punishment is therefore to stare eternally at the ground from which their treasures were taken and to feel bereft in the company of others. A contem­porary of Dante's, Gerard of Siena, wrote that "usury is wicked and bound with vice because it causes a natural thing to transcend its nature and an artificial thing to transcend the skill that created it, which is completely contrary to Nature." Gerard's argument is that natural things—oil, wine, grain—have a natural value; artificial things—coins and ingots—have a value measured by weight. Usury falsifies both, charging more for the former and demanding that the latter unnaturally multiply itself. Usury is the oppo­site of work. The Spanish poet Jorge Manrique, writing in the fifteenth cen­tury, recognized that only death would make equal this world of ours, split as it is between "those who live by their hands, / and the rich."⁹

The church took a stern view of usury. A series of decrees issuing from the Third Lateran Council of 1179 on through the Council of Vienna of 1311 ordered the excommunication of usurers, denied them Christian burial un­less they first repaid the interest to their debtors, and forbade local govern­ments to authorize their activities. These religious prescriptions had their roots in ancient Jewish rabbinical law, which prohibited charging interest on loans to fellow Jews (though interest could be charged to Gentiles). Echoing this, Saint Ambrose wrote, somewhat drastically, that "you have no right to take interest, save from him whom you have the right to kill." Saint Augus­tine thought that charging interest in whatever case was no better than legal­ized robbery. However, though in theory usury was both a sin and a canonical crime, in practice in the thriving monetary economy of medieval Italy, these prohibitions were hardly ever upheld. The citizens of Florence, for example, were from time to time compelled by decree to lend money to their govern­ment at an interest rate of 5 percent. And lawyers and accountants found ways to circumvent the anti-usury laws, providing documents of fictitious sales, presenting the loan as an investment, or finding loopholes in the laws themselves.¹⁰

The church's laws against usury can be seen as an early systematic at­tempt to create an economic theory in Europe. It rested on the assumption that the abolition of interest on loans would result in a consumer credit avail­able to all. In spite of these excellent intentions, the practical exceptions, as Dante makes clear, far outdid the theoretical rule. After three centuries of anti-usury policy, the church changed its tactics and lifted the restrictions on moneylending, allowing moderate interest charges. Usury, however, con­tinued to be considered a moral issue as well as a practical one, and in spite of the growing banking practices of the Vatican, it never ceased to be con­demned as a sin.¹¹

Usury has long been a favorite literary subject and, at least in the Anglo- Saxon world, Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge is its most famous incarnation. Like the Commedia, A Christmas Carol is divided into three parts and, like Dante, Scrooge is guided through each by a spirit. In the Commedia, Dante is made to witness the punishment of sinners but also their cleansing and redemption. In A Christmas Carol,, Scrooge is presented with a similar triple vision: the sinner's punishment, the offer of purgation, and the possibility of salvation. But while in the Commedia the sins are many, in Dickens's story the sin is only one, avarice, the root of all others. Avarice makes Scrooge forsake love, betray his friends, reject family ties, withdraw from his fellow human beings. As the young woman to whom he was betrothed tells him, freeing him from his vows, "a golden idol" has replaced her in his heart. To which Scrooge answers with the logic of bankers: "This is the even-handed dealing of the world! . . . There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!"¹²

Scrooge is shunned by everyone, even the friendly dogs who guide the blind. "It was," says Dickens, "the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance." He is "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner," and his sin condemns him to be an outcast, like the bankers at the edges of the seventh circle, alone in their singular agonies. His miserable life is a parody of the contemplative life sought by hermits and mystics whom in the fourth century Macarius of Egypt called "drunk with God," and his work (counting money) a parody of true labor.¹³

Dickens was the great chronicler of the working life and an angry critic of the sterile labors of bankers and bureaucrats. One of these financiers, Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit, is "a man of immense resources—enormous capital— government influence." His are "the best schemes afloat. They're safe. They're certain." Only after he has ruined hundreds with his schemes, is Mr. Merdle recognized as "a consummate rascal, of course, . . . but remarkably clever! One cannot help admiring the fellow. Must have been such a master of humbug. Knew people so well—got over them so completely—did so much with them!"¹⁴ A real-life Mr. Merdle, Bernard Madoff, one of the men who made enormous profits out of the economic crisis in 2010, was able to seduce many with his humbug. But unlike the insouciant Madoff, after his schemes fall apart Mr. Merdle cuts his throat in shame. The Mr. Merdles of this world continue to believe in money as a symbol of the good to be attained for the sake of their own selves.

Money is a complex symbol. The Nobel Prize—winning economist Paul Krugman gave, in one of his New York Times columns, three examples of its labyrinthine representations.¹⁵ The first is an open pit in Papua New Guinea, the Porgera gold mine, with an infamous reputation for human rights abuses and environmental damage, that continues to be exploited because gold prices have tripled since 2004. The second is a virtual mine, the bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, which uses a digital currency, the "bitcoin," which people buy because they believe that others will be willing to buy it in the future. "And like gold, it can be mined," says Krugman. "You can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that re­quire both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the com­puters." In the case of the bitcoin mine, real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.

The third representation is hypothetical. Krugman explains that in 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that increased government spending was needed to restore full employment. But then, as now, there was strong political opposition to this suggestion. So Keynes, tongue in cheek, suggested an alternative: have the government bury bottles of cash in disused coal mines, and let the private sector spend its own money digging them up. This "perfectly useless spending" would give the national economy "a much- needed boost." Keynes went farther. He pointed out that real-life gold min­ing was very much like this alternative. Gold miners go to great length to dig cash out of the ground even though unlimited amounts of cash can be cre­ated at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner is the gold dug up than much of it is buried again in places like the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Money is a symbol bereft of all but virtual signif­icance: it has become self-referential, like the pouches of Dante's bankers that reflect their owners and are reflected back. Money creates usury which creates money.

But where did our obsession with money begin? When was money in­vented? Our earliest writings mention no coinage, only transactions and lists of goods and livestock. Considering the question, Aristotle argued that money originated in natural bartering: the need for different goods led to the ex­change of these goods, and because many were not easily transported, money was invented as a conventional means of exchange. "The amounts were at first determined by size and weight," Aristotle wrote, "but eventually the pieces of metal were stamped. This did away with the necessity of weighing and measuring." Once a currency was established, Aristotle continued, the exchange of goods became trade, and with monetary profit commercial ac­tivities became more concerned with coined money than with the products bought and sold. "Indeed," Aristotle concluded, "wealth is often regarded as consisting in a pile of money, since the aim of money-making and of trade is to make such a pile." Though moneymaking can be, for Aristotle, necessary for administrative purposes, if it leads to usury it becomes something nox­ious because "of all the ways of getting wealth, this is the most contrary to nature." For Aristotle, the absurdity stems from a confusion between means and ends, or between the tools and the job.¹⁶

Dante, in the Convivio, analyzes this absurdity in a different light.¹⁷ Discussing the difference between the two roads to happiness, the contem­plative and the active, Dante refers to the example of Mary and Martha from the Gospel of Luke (chap. 10). Unlike the labors of moneymakers, who pretend to be active but don't do any real work, Mary's labors are excellent, even compared to those of her sister, Martha, who busies herself with house­hold chores. Dante refuses to consider manual efforts superior to intellectual ones, and likens both to the labors of the bees that produce wax as well as honey.

According to Luke, six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, Mar­tha and Mary gave a dinner in honor of Jesus who had raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. While Martha was working in the kitchen, Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. "Martha, Martha," said Jesus, "thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part." Dante interprets Christ's words as meaning that every moral virtue stems from choosing the right part, whichever that may be, according to who we are. For Mary, the "good part" is at the feet of her Savior, but Dante does not dismiss the fretting and fussing of Martha.

The scene in the house in Bethany casts its long shadow across our many centuries. Christians and non-Christians alike separate those who tend to menial daily tasks from those who are tended to because the occupations of the latter are supposed to take place on a higher, spiritual plane. At first the dichotomy was understood to be spiritual—between the contemplative and the active life—but this rapidly came to be understood (or misunderstood) as a division between those whom privilege sat at the feet (or in the chair) of divine (or earthly) power, and those who were left to busy themselves in the kitchens and sweatshops of the world.

Mary the sister of Lazarus is exalted in her many guises: as prince and potentate, wise man and mystic, priest and heroic figure, all those to whom fate has allotted "the better part." But Martha is never absent. Accompany­ing the Egyptian pharaohs in their sumptuous resting places, surrounding the

Chinese emperors as they travel across the magnificent length of a bamboo scroll, embedded in the mosaics of the courtyards of the Pompeian well-to-do, carrying on her unobtrusive life in the background of an Annunciation, pouring wine at Belshazzar's feast, half-hidden in the capitals of Romanesque church columns, framing a seated god on a Dogon carved door, Martha perseveres with her daily task of providing food, drink, and some measure of comfort. Dante never forgets those "who work by their hands": in the Com- media we meet masons building bulwarks in the Netherlands, pitch boilers who caulk the damaged ships in the Arsenal of Venice, cooks ordering their kitchen boys to dip the meat into large boilers with their hooks, peasants de­spairing as the frost covers their early crops, soldiers in the cavalry moving camp just as Dante himself must have done.

The first representations of workers' activities began to emerge in Europe in the late Middle Ages, no longer as accompaniments to depictions of "Vul­can's Forge" or "The Miraculous Catch" to justify the portrayal of a smithy or of fishermen, but as explicit subjects, a change that seems to coincide with the post-feudal society's interest in documentary depictions of itself. The il­lustration for each month in the famous fifteenth-century illuminated man­uscript Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows farmers, carpenters, shepherds, and reapers all engaged in their particular activities less as signposts for the changing seasons than as self-contained portraits of these members of society. They are among the first specific attempts to single out particular moments of a working life.

Caravaggio is perhaps one of the first painters to turn the convention of literary borrowings on its head. Even though on the surface his proletarian models serve as actors in the biblical dramatic scenes he constructs, the bib­lical scenes in fact are the excuse for the representations of common work­ing people. So obvious was the device and so shocking the apparent inten­tion, that (legend has it) in 1606, the Carmelites refused his Dormition of the Virgin, which they had commissioned, because the painter had used as his model the corpse of a young pregnant prostitute who had drowned herself in the Tiber. What the viewer saw was not, in spite of the title, the Mother of God in her final sleep but the pregnant body of a woman whom society had first exploited and then abandoned. (A similar scandal was provoked by the exhibition, in 1850, of John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents, a painting that was attacked by Charles Dickens, among others, for daring to represent the Holy Family less as a spiritual community of contem­plative Marys than as a common flesh-and-blood family of Martha-like carpenters.)¹⁸

But not until the explorations of the impressionists does work for its own sake, with all its everyday heroic and miserable connotations, become valued as a subject worthy of representation. Vuillard's seamstresses, Monet's waiters, Toulouse-Lautrec's laundry women, and, later, specific depictions of the workers' struggle in the Italian Divisionism school introduce what seems, if not a new subject, then a subject that has at last been granted its own stage. In these images, human labor is shown and commented upon not only in action but also in its consequences (exploitation and exhaus­tion), causes (ambition or hunger), and attendant tragedies (accidents and armed repression). Many of these images, often sentimentalized or roman­ticized, acquired after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia decorative, even purely graphic value in Soviet and later in Chinese poster art. On a far larger scale, they lost in Communist aesthetics much of their combative sin­gularity and, in a sense, reverted to the impersonal role given to workers in the earliest medieval depictions. Political and commercial advertising images of work became a parody of Martha's part, much as usury became a parody of Mary's.

Photography, however, the technology that came into being in Monet's time, helped to lend images of Martha's labors the dignity of the viewer's understanding. Manipulating the audience into the position of witness, pho­tography (when outside the field of advertising) framed the activities of the workers both as a document and as an aesthetic object, in images that de­manded a narrative political context and, at the same time, followed varying rules of composition and lighting. The minuscule sixteenth-century masons crawling up Breughel's Tower of Babel (of which three versions exist) are less, in the viewer's eye, suffering slaves than a collective element in the biblical narrative. Four centuries after Breughel, the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao

Sebastiao Salgado, Gold-mine workers in Serra Pelada, Brazil, 1986. (© Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas—Contact Press Images)

Salgado exhibited a Breughelesque series of images that showed destitute gold diggers swarming up and down the walls of a monstrous Amazonian quarry, images which allow hardly any other reading than that of the worker as victim, fellow human beings condemned to hell on earth in our time. In one of his early exhibitions, Salgado quoted Dante's description of the con­demned souls gathering on the banks of the Acheron:

As in the autumn the leaves fall off one after the other, until the branch sees all its spoils upon the ground,

so the wicked seed of Adam cast themselves from that shore one by one at summons, like a bird responding to his call.¹⁹

Documentary images such as those of Salgado invariably echo estab­lished stories that lend them, in metaphorical or allegorical form, a shape and an argument. Salgado's army of workers can be compared to the pun­ished souls in Hell, but they are also the builders of Babylon, the slaves at the pyramids, the allegorical image of all human toil on this earth of sweat and suffering. This does not detract from the viewer's literal reading, from the factual value of Salgado's images, but it allows his photographic depic­tions to acquire yet another level of story, as Dante would have argued: to reach back into our history and rescue images of Martha that had difficulty in surfacing.

After the birth of his sons Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886, Oscar Wilde composed for them a series of short stories which were later published in two collections. The second, A House of Pomegranates, begins with a story called "The Young King." A young shepherd boy is discovered to be the heir to the throne and is brought to the royal palace. The night before his coronation he has three dreams in which he sees his crown, scepter, and mantle crafted and woven by "the white hands of Pain" and refuses to wear them. To change his mind, the people tell him that suffering has always been their lot, and that "to toil for a master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still." "Are not the rich and the poor brothers?" asks the young King. "Ay," they answer, "and the name of the rich brother is Cain."²⁰

The young King's third dream shows Death and Avarice watching over an army of workers struggling in a tropical forest. Because Avarice won't part with a few seeds that it clutches in its bony hand, Death responds by slaugh­tering all of Avarice's men. This is Wilde's description of the scene Salgado was to photograph a century later: "There he saw an immense multitude of men toiling in the bed of a dried-up river. They swarmed up the crag like ants. They dug deep pits in the ground and went down into them. Some of them cleft the rocks with great axes; others grabbed in the sand. . . . They hurried about, calling to each other, and no man was idle."²¹ Then, outside the frame of Salgado's photograph, in the fifth circle of Hell, Avarice closes her fist.

14

How Can We Put Things in Order?

Even as a child, I grew accustomed to seeing the world divided into parts, according to the colored patches on my pivoting globe. I learned to say "earth" to mean the clump of dirt I picked up in my hand, and "Earth" to denote the vast clump of dirt, too big to be seen, that my teachers told me circles endlessly around the sun. Every time I move, clumps of earth mark my passage through life like the ticking of a clock, as if time (my time) could be measured in handfuls, each handful unique and distinguishable as part of the place where something has happened to me—where something, quite literally, has taken place. As a place marking time, the earth we tread on ac­quires, in our symbolic vocabularies, the values of birth, life, and death.

Atlases, maps, encyclopedias, dictionaries attempt to order and label ev­erything we know about the earth and the sky. Our earliest books are Sume- rian lists and catalogues, as if giving things names and placing them under various categories allowed us an understanding of them. When I was a child, the ordering of my books suggested to me curious associations by subject, size, language, author, color. All seemed valid upon my shelves and each order transformed the included books into something that I had not noticed

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil contemplate the punishment of the Simonists, whose heads are forced into holes in the rock. Woodcut illustrating Canto XIX of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino.

(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

before. Treasure Island had a place among my books about pirates, among my books with brown covers, among my middle-sized books, among my books written in English. I acknowledged all these labels for my Treasure Island, but what did they mean?

Several mythologies see earth as the stuff we are made of, modeled into God's own image by his wizard hand and allotted a specific place and role; earth is also the source of our food and the container of our drink; in the end, earth is the home to which we return and the dust that we become. These categories all define it. A Zen parable which a quirky teacher had us read in high school tells of a disciple who asks his master what is life. The master picks up a handful of earth and lets it sift through his fingers. Then the disciple asks the master what is death. The master repeats the same ges­ture. The disciple asks what is the Buddha. Again, the master repeats his gesture. The disciple bows his head and thanks the master for his answers. "But those were not answers," says the master. "Those were questions."

The earth does not argue,

Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,

Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,

Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,

Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,

Ofall the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves ofGrass

_T

aking time to accustom themselves to the dismal stench that rises from the seventh circle, where the violent are punished, Virgil and Dante take refuge behind a large stone that announces itself as the tomb of Pope Anastasius, punished for his heretical views. Virgil profits from the wait to instruct Dante on the arrangement of the circles of Lower Hell in order to prepare him for the terrible regions that still lie ahead. Coming after the encounter with the heretics who tried to disarrange and confuse the di­vine laws, Virgil's careful description of the ordered Underworld can be read as a powerful reminder that everything in the universe, as everything in the Commedia, has a carefully assigned and singular place. Against this rigorously tidy background all human dramas in the poem are played out, sometimes with detailed reference to the setting, other times with barely a mention of the contextual details. But because everything that occurs in the three realms of the afterlife has a reason and a logical justification (even if it isn't a human logic or a reason that is humanly comprehensible) each punishment, purga­tion, and reward is strictly and immutably confined to a given place in a preestablished system, mirroring the perfect order of God's mind. The words inscribed on the gate of Hell quoted earlier are valid for the whole of the Otherworld: "Divine Power made me, / Wisdom supreme and primal Love."¹ Hell, because it is God's creation like the rest of universe, cannot be any less than perfect.

Virgil's lesson in geography grounds the nightmarish journey in a land­scape of dirt and stone with such precision that Galileo, as we have seen, would later feel able to calculate its measurements. Virgil gives his exposition in two parts: first describing the sections of Hell to come, then responding to Dante's questions about the regions already visited.

After the circle of the heretics lie the circles that lodge the sinners guilty of malice, in which the intellect has a willing part. These damned souls are split into those guilty of perpetrating injustice unthinkingly and those who committed injustice by choice, a much more dreadful fault. The former, lodged in the seventh circle, are in turn divided into three: those who have been violent towards others, towards themselves, and towards God. Those guilty of perpetrating injustice through reason, punished in the next circle, include those guilty of fraud in its various guises. In the ninth and last cir­cle are the traitors; at the very center is the arch-traitor, Lucifer. In answer to Dante's questions, Virgil tells him that the sinners in the second to fifth circles—the lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious and spendthrifts, and the wrathful—are guilty of the sin of incontinence, a sin (following Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics) considered less grievous than that of malice, and therefore outside the fiery walls of the City of Dis.²

Exactly halfway up Mount Purgatory, Virgil undertakes the same cate­gorical exposition for Dante's (and the reader's) benefit. The source of the arrangement here is not Aristotle but Christian dogma concerning the nature of sins and virtues. Waiting for the sun to rise (since the laws of Purgatory forbid them to travel at night), and before visiting the souls who purge them­selves of the sin of sloth, Virgil explains to Dante the cartography of Purgatory. Here, says Virgil, the ruling force is love, both natural and rational, love that moves not only the Creator but his creatures.

The natural is always without error, but the other one can err through aiming wrongly, or through too little or too much force.³

The categories of love are represented by the various sins purged on the mountain. Those who aim their love wrongly are the proud, the envious and the wrathful; those whose love lacks vigor are the slothful; those whose love inclines them too strongly towards earthly things are the avaricious, the glut­tons, and the lustful. Each group has a strict place allotted in the ascent. The bureaucracy of Purgatory is very strict.

Paradise is somewhat different from the other two realms because, even if the Celestial Kingdom is partitioned, as we have seen earlier, into several heavens, each blessed soul, wherever it might be, is utterly blissful. As Pic- carda tells Dante, after he asks her whether the souls desire a higher position in the grades of heaven:

Brother, our will is satisfied by the quality of love that makes us long only for what we have and thirst for nothing else.

Piccarda movingly concludes: "And in his will is our peace." According to God's will, the universe exists in a perfect and immutable order where every­thing, in Heaven as on Earth (and below it), has been assigned its proper place.⁴

We are tidy creatures. We distrust chaos. Though experience comes to us with no recognizable system, for no intelligible reason, with blind and care­free generosity, we believe despite all evidence to the contrary in law and order, and portray our gods as meticulous archivists and dogmatic librarians. Following what we believe to be the method of the universe, we put every­thing away into files and compartments; feverishly we arrange, we classify, we label. We know that what we call the world has no meaningful beginning and no understandable end, neither a discernible purpose nor a method in its madness. But we insist: it must make sense, it must signify something. So we divide space into regions and time into days, and again and again we are bewildered when space refuses to hold to the borders of our atlases and time overflows the dates of our history books. We collect objects and build houses for them in the hope that the walls will give the contents coherence and a meaning. We will not accept the inherent ambiguity of any object or collec­tion that charms our attention by saying, like the voice in the burning bush, "I am that I am." "All right," we add, "but you are also a thornbush, Prunus spinosa," and give it its place in the herbarium. We believe that location will help us understand events and their protagonists, and that all the chattel they

Map of Dante's Hell in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi's edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 1, pp. xlx—xlxi. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: (first section) Gate of Hell; The Plains of Acheron: Neutrals; Acheron River; incontinence/circles II-V: Circle I: Limbo; Circle II: The Lustful; Cir­cle III: Gluttons; Circle IV: Spenders and Hoarders; Circle V: The Wrathful and Sullen; The Walls of the City of Dis; Circle VI: Heretics; (second section) violence/circle VII: Cornice I: Violent Toward Others, Toward People: Tyrants and Murderers, Toward Things: Robbers and Plunderers; Cornice II: Violent Toward Self, Toward People: Sui­cides, Toward Things: Squanderers; Cornice III: Violent Toward God, Toward People: Blasphemers, Toward Things: Sodomites and Usurers; (third and fourth sections) fraud (thirdsection) against the untrustworthy (frauds)/malebolge: circle VIII: 1. Flatter­ers; 2. Seducers; 3. Simoniacs; 4. Diviners; 5. Barrators; 6. Hypocrites; 7. Thieves; 8. False Counselors; 9. Schismatics; 10. Falsifiers; (fourth section) against those who betray trust (traitors)/the lake of ice: circle IX: Caina: Traitors to Kin; Antenora: Traitors to Country; Ptolemea: Traitors to Guests; Judecca: Traitors to Benfactors; Lucifer. Right-hand schema: Paradise; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; earth: Hemisphere of Water, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem. (Translation by Will Schutt.)

Map of Dante's Purgatory in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi's edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 2, pp. xlviii-xlix. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: Earthly Paradise; (first section) excessive love of worldly goods: Cornice VII: Lust; Cornice VI: Gluttony; Cornice V: Avarice; (second section) defective love: Cornice IV: Sloth; (thirdsection) misdirected love: Cornice III: Wrath; Cornice II: Envy; Cornice I: Pride; Gate of Purgatory; (fourth section) ante-purgatory (souls who repented at the final hour): Negligent Rulers; Those Who Died by Vio­lence; The Lethargic; Excommunicates; Ocean. Right-hand schema.: Paradise; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; earth: Hemisphere of Water, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem. (Translation by Will Schutt.)

Map of Dante's Heaven in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi's edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), vol. 3, pp. lviii—lix. (Used with permission.) Reading from top to bottom, left to right: God; Believers in Christ; Mary/Rose of the Blessed; Believers in Christ; (upper rings) heaven/empyrean: IX (Heaven) Crystalline Heaven or Primum Mobile (Empyrean) Vision of the Nine Angelic Choirs; VIII (Heaven) Starry Heaven or Fixed Stars (Empyrean) Vision of the Church Triumphant; VII (Heaven) Heaven of Sat­urn (Empyrean) Contemplative Souls; VI (Heaven) Heaven of Jupiter (Empyrean) Just Souls; V (Heaven) Heaven of Mars (Empyrean) Souls Who Fought for the Faith; IV (Heaven) Heaven of Sun (Empyrean) Wise Souls; III (Heaven) Heaven of Venus (Empy­rean) Souls of Lovers; II (Heaven) Heaven of Mercury (Empyrean) Souls Who Worked for Glory; I (Heaven) Heaven of Moon (Empyrean) Souls Who Failed to Keep Their Vows; (center schema) circle of fire; Earthly Paradise; Purgatory; air/air; earth: Hemisphere of Water, Lucifer, Hemisphere of Emerged Land, Hell, Jerusalem; (lower rings) Angels; Archangels; Principalities; Powers; Virtues; Dominions; Thrones; Cherubim; Seraphim. (Translation by Will Schutt.) take on their adventures and misadventures will be defined by the place we assign it. We trust maps.

Vladimir Nabokov, prior to delivering his Harvard lectures on the novel, used to prepare charts of the locations in which the novels he taught took place, just like the ones found in the "scene of the crime" plans that used to accompany detective novels in the pocket editions of the forties and fifties: a map of Great Britain with the sites of Bleak House, the layout of Sotherton Court in Mansfield Park, the Samsa family's flat in The Metamorphosis, Leo­pold Bloom's path through Dublin in Ulysses.⁵ Nabokov understood the in­extricable relationship between a setting and its narrative (a relationship that is of the essence in the Commedia).

A museum, an archive, a library are each a species of map, a place of defining categories, an organized realm of predetermined sequences. Even an institution that houses an apparently heterogeneous collection of objects, assembled, it would seem, without a clear purpose, becomes identified by a label that is not that of any of its several pieces: the name of their collector, for instance, or the circumstances of their assembly, or the overall category within which the objects are inscribed.

The first university museum—the first museum built for the purpose of facilitating study of a specific group of objects—was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, founded in 1683. At its core was a collection of strange and won­derful things amassed by two seventeenth-century botanists and gardeners, father and son, both called John Tradescant, and sent to Oxford by barge from London. Several of these treasures are listed in the museum's earliest catalogue:

A Babylonian Vest.

Diverse sorts of Egges from Turkic; one given for a Dragons egge.

Easter Egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem.

Two feathers of the Phoenix tayle.

The claw of the bird Rock: who, as Authors report, is able to trusse an Elephant.

Dodar, from the island Mauritius; it is not able to fly being so big.

Hares head, with rough horns three inches long.

Toad fish, and one with prickles.

Divers things cut on Plum-stones.

A Brazen-balle to warme the Nunnes hands.⁶

A phoenix's feather and a nun's warming-ball, a toad fish and hare's horned head have little in common: what holds them together is the fascina­tion these objects produced, three centuries ago, in the minds and hearts of the two Tradescants. Whether these objects represented the Tradescants' greed or curiosity, whether they were real or fabulous, their vision of the world or a reflection of the dark map of their souls, those who visited the Ashmolean in the late seventeenth century would enter a space ordered, so to speak, by the Tradescants' ruling passion. Private imagination can lend the world co­herence and a semblance of order.

And yet no order, as we know, however coherent, is ever impartial. Any categorical system imposed on objects or souls or ideas must be suspect since, of necessity, it contaminates with meaning those very ideas, people, objects. The Babylonian vest and the Easter eggs of the Ashmolean formulate a seventeenth- century notion of private property; the sinners in Hell and the blessed in Heaven enact their singular dramas, collectively representing both a thirteenth- century Christian cosmogony and Dante's intimate vision of the world. The Commedia is in this sense an imaginary universal museum, a stage for the performance of unconscious fears and desires, a library of everything that was one poet's passion and vision, arranged and displayed for our enlightenment.

In the Middle Ages such eclectic collections were amassed by the church and the nobility, but the habit of exposing one's private passions to public view can be traced, in Europe, to the late fifteenth century. At a time when heads of state had begun to amass some of the world's greatest collections of art in Vienna, the Vatican, Spain's El Escorial, Florence, and Versailles, smaller, more personal collections were also being formed by private individuals. One such collection was that of Isabella d'Este, wife of the marquis of Mantua, who, rather than purchasing art for devotional reasons or to furnish a house, began collecting works of art for the sake of the objects themselves. Up to that time, the wealthy collected artwork mainly to lend a domestic space beauty or prestige. Isabella reversed the process and set aside a room that would instead provide a frame to the objects she had collected. In her camerino, or "small chamber" (which was to become famous in the history of art as one of the earliest private museums), Isabella exhibited "paintings with a story" by the best contemporary artists. She had a good eye: she instructed her agents to approach Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo, Perugino, Giorgione, Ra­phael, and Michelangelo in order to obtain artwork for her camerino. Several of these artists complied.⁷

A century later the collecting passion took over the houses not only of aristocrats like Isabella but also of the rich bourgeoisie, and owning a private collection became an indication of social status, financial or scholarly. What Francis Bacon called "a model of the universal nature made private" could be seen in the parlors of many lawyers and physicians. The French word cabinet, referring to a piece of furniture with lockable drawers or a small wood- paneled room like the camerino, became commonplace in wealthy homes. In England, the cabinet was called a closet, from the Latin clausum, or "closed," indicating the private nature of the space. In the rest of Europe, the private collection of heterogeneous objects came to be known as a cabinet de curi­osities or Wunderkammer. Some of the most famous, assembled during the following centuries, were those of Rudolph II in Prague, Ferdinand II in Ambras Castle at Innsbruck, Ole Worm in Copenhagen, Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg, Gustaf Adolphus in Stockholm, and the architect Sir Hans Sloane in London. Fostered by men like these, curiosity was officially given its place in the household.⁸

Sometimes, when cash was lacking, curiosity collectors resorted to inge­nious devices. In 1620, the scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo assembled in his house in Rome not the original works of art, the authentic handcrafted models of famous buildings, the natural-history specimens sought after by his wealthier peers, but drawings commissioned from professional draftsmen of all kinds of strange objects, creatures, and antiquities. He called this his Paper Mu­seum. Here again, as in Isabella's camerino and in the Tradescants' collection, the ruling design, the imposed order, was personal, a Gestalt created by one person's private history—with an added characteristic: the objects themselves were no longer required to be the real thing. These could now be replaced by their imagined representations. And since these reproductions were much cheaper and easier to come by than the originals, the Paper Museum allowed even those of moderate means to become collectors. Borrowing the notion of surrogate reality from literature, where the representation of an experience is equivalent to the experience itself, the Paper Museum enabled the collector to possess a shadow model of the universe under his or her roof. Not every­one approved, echoing the criticism of the Neoplatonist scholar Marsilio Ficino, who in the fifteenth century spoke of "those who in their wretched­ness prefer the shadows of things to things themselves."⁹

The idea of collecting shadows is very ancient. The Ptolemaic kings, con­scious of the impossibility of gathering the whole of the known world within the borders of Egypt, conceived the idea of collecting in Alexandria, within the walls of one building, every representation of whatever knowledge of the world they could lay their hands on, and so sent out orders to bring to their univer­sal library every scroll or tablet that could be found, acquired, copied, or sto­len. Every ship docking at the port of Alexandria had to give up any book it carried so a copy could be made, after which the original (or sometimes the copy) would be returned to its owner. It is surmised that at the height of its fame the Library of Alexandria held a collection of over half a million scrolls.¹⁰

Setting up an ordered space for displaying information is always a dangerous enterprise, since, as in the case of any scaffolding or frame, the arrangement, however neutral its intention, always affects the contents. An all-encompassing poem, read as religious allegory, fantastical adventure, or autobiographical pilgrimage, much as a universal library of incised, hand­written, printed, or electronic texts, translates each of the elements collected under its roof into the language of the framework. No structure is innocent of meaning.

A spiritual heir of the Alexandrian Ptolemies was an extraordinary man called Paul Otlet, born in Brussels on 23 August 1868 to a family of financiers and city planners. As a child, Otlet showed a remarkable interest in ordering things: his toys, his books, his pets. His favorite game, in which his younger brother took part, was bookkeeping, listing debits and credits in neat col­umns, and filing timetables and catalogues. He also liked drawing plots for the plants in the garden and building rows of pens for the barnyard animals. Later, when the family moved for a time to a small Mediterranean island off the French coast, Otlet began a collection of bits and pieces—shells, minerals, fossils, Roman coins, animal skulls—with which he built his own cabinet de curiosites. At the age of fifteen, he founded with several school friends the Private Society of Collectors and edited a magazine for its members severely titled La Science. About the same time, Otlet discovered in his father's library the Encyclopedie Larousse, "a book," he later said, "that explains everything and gives all the answers."¹¹ And yet the many-volumed Larousse was for the ambitious young man too modest in its scope, and Otlet began a project that would see the light several decades later: the preparation of a universal en­cyclopedia that would include not merely answers and explanations but the totality of human questioning.

In 1892, the young Otlet met Henri Lafontaine, who was to receive in 1913 the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts toward an international peace move­ment. The two men became inseparable, and like Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert's endless seekers of information, Otlet and Lafontaine would to­gether scour libraries and archives to compile an enormous collection of bibliographical resources in every field of knowledge. Inspired by the deci­mal system of library classification invented by the American Melvin Dewey in 1876, Otlet and Lafontaine decided to use Dewey's system on a worldwide bibliographical scale, and wrote to Dewey for permission. The result was the creation of the Office international de Bibliographie in 1895, centered in Brussels but with correspondents in many countries. In the first few years of the institute's existence, an army of young female employees went through the catalogues of libraries and archives, transcribing the data onto 7.5 x 12.5- centimeter index cards at an approximate rate of two thousand cards a day. In 1912, the number of cards of the Office reached more than ten million; an additional hundred thousand iconographical documents included photo­graphic images, as well as transparencies, film stills, and movie reels.

Otlet believed that cinema, together with the recently invented (but not yet made public) television, was the way in which information would be trans­mitted in the future. To foster this idea, he developed a revolutionary ma­chine (similar to microfilm) that copied books photographically and projected the pages onto a screen. He called his invention a bibliophote, or "projected book," and he imagined the possibility of spoken books, of books transmit­ted from a distance, and of books made visible in three dimensions—fifty years before the invention of the hologram—that would all be available to private citizens in their own homes, like today's Internet. Otlet called these gadgets "substitutes for the book."¹²

To visualize the extent to which Dewey's decimal system could be put to use in the vast maze of documentation, Otlet drew a chart comparing Dewey's system to a sun whose rays spread and multiply as they retreat from the center, embracing every branch of human knowledge. The diagram un­cannily resembles Dante's final vision of three luminous circles in one, spread­ing their combined light throughout the universe, containing everything and being everything.

Oh light eternal, that in yourself abide, only yourself understands, and, self-understood and self-understanding, loves yourself and laughs!¹³

Otlet was always a keen collector, and the universal archive he imagined would not neglect anything. Like the Jews who preserved in the Cairo Geniza every scrap of paper in case it might contain, unbeknownst, the name of God, Otlet kept everything.¹⁴ A small example: before leaving on his honeymoon in 1890, the young Otlet and his bride went to weigh themselves in the Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris. The tickets, indicating that Otlet weighed 70 kilos and his wife 55, were carefully preserved by Otlet in cellophane enve­lopes and can been seen today in a cardboard box containing his assorted cards and papers. "You see the essential in what is accessory," a friend re­marked to Otlet, a useful way of explaining Otlet's omnivorous curiosity.¹⁵

Collecting led to cataloguing and classifying. Otlet's grandson Jean re­called that one day, as they were strolling together on the beach, they came upon a number of jellyfish washed up on the sand. Otlet stopped, gathered the jellyfish into a pyramid, took out a blank card from the pocket of his vest, and wrote the creature's classification according to the Office international de Bibliographie: "5933." The number 5 indicated the category of general sciences, followed by 9, it was narrowed down to zoology, with a 3 added, to coelenterates, and with another 3, to jellyfish, 5933. Then he fixed the card to the top of the gelatinous compilation, and they continued their stroll.¹⁶

Otlet's chart depicting the division of all branches of knowledge, from Frangoise Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum (Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2006). (Illustration © Collections Mundaneum [Belgium])

Otlet's organizational passion led him to support the utopian project of a Norwegian architect, Hendrik Andersen, for an ideal city that was to serve as the World Centre for Peace and Harmony. Several sites were suggested: Tervuren in Flanders, Fiumicino near Rome, Constantinople, Paris, Berlin, and somewhere in New Jersey. The ambitious dream provoked much skepti­cism among politicians as well as among intellectuals. Henry James, who was a good friend of Andersen and admired the Norwegian's sculptures, abhorred the idea of such an elephantine plan. In a letter addressed to Andersen, James called his friend a megalomaniac. "How can I throw myself on your side," he wrote, "to the extent of employing to back you a single letter of the Alphabet when you break to me anything so fantastic or out of relation to any reality of any kind in all the weary world???" James should not have been surprised: as a novelist, he had shown how deeply he understood the megalomaniac character. In 1897 his Spoils ofPoynton had dissected Mrs. Gereth's obsession with the bric-a-brac collected over the years in her splendid house, Poynton. "To have created such a place," James had written, "was to have had dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest attitude was the right one." The Ideal City of Andersen, like the mountains of data collected by Otlet in the Office, were, like Poynton for Mrs. Gereth, a totality of things too precious to admit reproof of any kind. "There are things in the house that we almost starved for!" says Mrs. Gereth. "They were our religion, they were our life, they were us!" As James made clear, these "'things' were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not missing."¹⁷ Andersen, like Otlet, was of a similar mind. James's criticism went unheeded.

Otlet became obsessed with the project, which he now named his Mun- daneum, and which, in his vision, would comprise a museum, a library, a large auditorium, and a separate building devoted to scientific research. He proposed that the Mundaneum be built in Geneva under the motto "Classi­fication of everything, by all and for all." The most famous architect of the time, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, sup­ported the project and drew up an audacious plan for Otlet's city; Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American millionaire, offered to help finance it. But in October 1929, the crash of Wall Street put an end to all hopes for Ameri­can financial support, and Otlet's utopian project was all but forgotten.¹⁸

Yet the basic concept of the Mundaneum, of various collections "con­ceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects," survived immutable in their catalogued sequences, stowed away in the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brus­sels, until 1940.¹⁹ On 10 May of that year, the German army invaded Belgium, and Otlet and his wife were forced to abandon their precious collection and seek refuge in France. Desperate to save his classified universe, Otlet wrote pleading letters to Marshall Petain, to President Roosevelt, even to Hitler. But his efforts proved useless. The Palais that lodged his collection was disman­tled, the furniture he lovingly designed was transferred to the Palais de Jus­tice, and the books and documents put away in boxes. When Otlet returned home after the liberation of Brussels, on 4 September 1944, he discovered that the card indexes and iconographic files had been replaced by an exhibi­tion of "new art" from the Third Reich, the Nazis had destroyed sixty tons of periodicals catalogued in the institute, and two hundred thousand volumes of the carefully assembled library had disappeared. Paul Otlet died, heart­broken, in 1944.

After his death, the remains of his colossal project were stored in Brus- sels's insalubrious Institute d'Anatomie. After a few more displacements, in 1992 the dismembered collection found at last a secure place in a renovated 1930s department store in the Belgian city of Mons, where, after being pains­takingly reorganized, the new Mundaneum opened its doors in 1996.²⁰

Perhaps an explanation for Otlet's obsession can be found in a diary entry of 1916. There Otlet says that after an illness suffered in his adolescence (a mixture, according to him, of scarlet fever, diphtheria, meningitis, and ty­phus), he lost his textual memory and could no longer learn by heart poems or sections of prose. To remedy this, he explains, "I learned to correct my memory through reason."²¹ Unable to memorize facts and figures by himself, Otlet perhaps imagined his Office international de Bibliographie or Mun- daneum as a sort of surrogate memory that could be constructed through index cards, images, books, and other documents. It is certain that Otlet loved the world and longed to know everything about the things of the world, and yet, like the sinners described by Virgil, he erred by directing his love towards a mistaken goal, or with too much vigor. It is to be hoped that the God in whom he believed found it in his heart to forgive a fellow cataloguer.

In 1975, Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps inspired by the character of Otlet, wrote a long story called "The Congress" in which a man tries to compile an encyclopedia from which nothing on earth should be excluded.²² This vir­tual version of the world proves in the end to be impossible or, as the narra­tor concludes, useless, since the world, to our joy and sorrow, already exists. In the last pages, the ambitious encyclopedist takes his fellow researchers on a horse-and-buggy ride through Buenos Aires, but the city they now see, with its houses, trees, and people, is not alien and individual: it is the re­searchers' own creation, the one they had bravely attempted and which now, suddenly and full of wonder, they realize has always been there.

15

What Comes Next?

some time in the nineties, when I was visiting Berlin, the writer Stan Persky took me to see Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting of the Fountain of Youth at the Gemaldegalerie. It is a medium-sized canvas that depicts, in great detail, a rectangular swimming pool, seen in perspective, full of happily cavorting men and women. Old people are arriving from the left in carts and wheelbarrows; youths emerge naked from the other side, where a series of red tents await them, like those bathing-machines of which Lewis Carroll's Snark was so inordinately fond.

The Cranach painting led Stan and me into a discussion of whether we would like to extend the length of our lives, if such a thing were possible. I said that the foreseeable end did not frighten or worry me; on the contrary, I liked the idea of living with a conclusion in mind, and compared an im­mortal life to an endless book which, however charming, would end up being tiresome. Stan, however, argued that living on, perhaps forever (provided he were free of sickness and infirmities), would be an excellent thing. Life, he said, was so enjoyable, that he never wanted it to end.

When we had that conversation, I was not yet fifty; more than fifteen years later, I am more convinced than ever that an endless life is not worth

(Opposite) Minos consigning each sinner to his place in Hell. Woodcut illustrating Canto V of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Fountain ofYouth, 1546 (Gemaldegalerie). (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. © Leemage/Bridgeman Images.)

living. It is not that I think I have many decades left to go: it is difficult to be certain without holding the entire volume in my hands, but I'm fairly sure that I'm on one of the last chapters. So much has occurred, so many charac­ters have come and gone, so many places have been visited that I don't sup­pose the story can continue for many more pages without petering out into an incoherent and incontinent babble.

"The days of our age," the Psalmist tells us, "are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years: yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away, and we are gone." I am now less than a decade away from that figure, which until re­cently seemed to me as remote as the last digit of pi. I realize that in what I must now call my old age, my body is constantly shuffling its weight upon my conscious mind, as if jealous of the attention I give my thoughts and trying to edge them out by brute force. Up to a short time ago, I had imag­ined that my body ruled only over my youth, and that with maturity, my mind would take the privileged place. And because of the hold I believed each one, body and mind, had upon a distinct half of my life, I imagined that they would reign unobtrusively and fairly, one in quiet succession after the other.

In the beginning, I suspect, that is how it was. In my adolescence and early adulthood, my mind seemed like a jumbled, uncertain presence, clum­sily intruding upon the carefree life of the ruling body, which took pleasure wherever it found it. Paradoxically, my body felt then less solid than my thoughts, and made its presence felt only through my eclectic senses, smell­ing the cool air of the morning or walking through a city at night, eating breakfast in the sunshine or holding my lover's body in the dark. Even read­ing was a bodily activity: the touch, the smell, the look of the words on a page were an essential part of my relationship to books.

Now pleasure comes mainly through thinking, and dreams and ideas seem richer and clearer than ever before. The mind wants to come into its own, but the old body, like a deposed tyrant, refuses to withdraw and insists on constant attention: biting, scratching, pressing, howling, or falling into a state of numbness or unwarranted exhaustion. A leg burns, a bone chills, a hand seizes up, an anonymous bluntness prods me somewhere in the gut, distracting me from books and conversation and even from thought itself. In my youth, I always felt as if I were on my own, even in the company of others, because my body never nagged me, never appeared as something sep­arate from me, as a shameful Doppelganger. It was absolutely and indivisibly my whole self, singular, invincible, casting no shadow, like the body of Peter Schlemiel. Now even when I'm alone my body is always there like an unwel­come visitor, making noises when I want to think or sleep, elbowing my side when I sit or walk about.

In a Brothers Grimm tale I liked as a child, Death is struck down on a country road and is rescued by a young peasant. To thank him for his deed, Death makes his rescuer a promise: since he cannot exempt him from dying, for all men must die, before coming for him Death will send his messengers. Several years later, Death appears at the peasant's door. The terrified man reminds Death of his promise. "But have I not sent you my messengers?" Death asks. "Did not Fever come and smite you, and shake you, and cast you down? Has Dizziness not bewildered your head? Have not Cramps twitched your limbs? Did not Toothache bite your cheeks? And besides that, has not my own brother Sleep reminded you every night of me? Did you not lie by night as if you were already dead?"

My body seems to welcome these messengers daily, preparing to receive their master. The prospect of a longer sleep doesn't trouble me, and that too has changed. In my youth, death was merely part of my literary imagination, something that happened to evil stepmothers and stout-hearted heroes, to evil Professor Moriarty and brave Alonso Quijano. The end of a book was conceivable and (if the book was good) lamented, but I could not picture the possibility of my own end. Like all young people, I was immortal, and time had been granted to me without term of expiration. As May Swenson put it:

Can it be there was only one summer that I was ten? It must have been a long one then—

Today, summers are so short that barely have we put out the garden chairs when we are storing them away again; we hang up the Christmas lights for what seems only a few hours, while the new year comes and goes, and a new decade follows. This rush doesn't unsettle me: I'm accustomed to the accelerated pace of the final pages in a story I've enjoyed. I feel some mild regret, yes. I am aware that the characters I grew to know so well will have to say their few last words, perform their last gestures, circle just one more time around the inaccessible castle, or drift away into the sea fog strapped onto the back of a whale. But everything that needed to be tidied up is tidied up, and anything that must remain unresolved will remain unresolved. I know that my desk is ordered to my satisfaction, my letters mostly answered, my books in their right places, my writing more or less finished (not my read­ing, but that, of course, is the nature of the beast). My list of "Things to Do," propped up in front of me, still has a number of uncrossed items on it; but they have always been there and they always will, however many times I reach the bottom of the list. Like my library, my list of "Things to Do" is not meant ever to be exhausted.

Talmudists say that the stern injunction to make certain, through thoughts and deeds, that one's name is written in the Book of Life means that we ourselves must become responsible for that inscription, that we must be our own scribes. In that case, for as long as I can remember, I have been writing my name in the words of others, taking dictation, as it were, from those au­thors (such as Stan Persky) whom I've had the fortune to make mine through their books. Petrarch, in one of his letters, confesses that he has read Virgil, Boethius, and Horace not once but thousands of times, and that if he stopped reading them now (he is writing at the age of forty), for the rest of his life their books would still remain within him, "since they have dug their roots into my heart, so deeply that often I forget who wrote them and, like some­one who because of having owned and made use of a book for so long, I become myself its author and hold it for my own." I echo his words. As Petrarch understood it, the intimate conviction of readers is that there are no individually written books: there is only one text, infinite and fragmented, through which we leaf with no concern for continuity or anachronism or bureaucratic property claims. Since I first started reading, I know that I think in quotations and that I write with what others have written, and that I can have no other ambition than to reshuffle and rearrange. I find great satisfac­tion in this task. And at the same time, I'm convinced that no satisfaction can be truly everlasting.

I find it easier to imagine my own death than to imagine the death of everything. In spite of theology and science fiction, the end of the world is difficult to conceive from our egocentric viewpoint: what is the stage like once the audience has departed? What does the aftermath of the last univer­sal moment look like once there is no one left to see it? These seemingly trite conundrums show up to what point our capacity to imagine is bound by the consciousness of the first-person singular.

Seneca tells the story of the ninety-year-old Sextus Turannius, an ad­ministrator under Caligula, who, when the emperor relieved him of his post, "ordered his household to lay him out and start wailing about his bed as if he were dead. The household went into mourning for the unemployment of their aged master and did not lay their mourning aside until his work was restored to him." With this stratagem, Turannius achieved what appeared to be impossible and became a witness to his own funeral. Seventeen centuries later, and for less practical reasons, the eccentric American businessman "Lord" Timothy Dexter faked his own death in order to see how people would react. Since the apocryphal widow didn't show enough signs of distress at the fu­neral, upon restoring himself to life, the disappointed Dexter gave her a tre­mendous beating.

My imagination is more modest: I simply see myself concluded, devoid of decisions, of thoughts, fears and emotions, no longer here and now in any perceptible sense, unable to use the verb "to be."

. . no death . . . There's only . . . me . . . me who's dying. . .

—ANDR.fi Malraux, La Voie royale

_T

he world is always here, but we are not. However, in the Commedia there is no death. Or rather, the death of the souls that Dante meets has taken place before the story starts. After that, every human soul in the three terrible kingdoms is alive until the Day of Judgment. As Dante finds, the death of the body has stripped the individuals of very little except perhaps a will of their own. And language is still theirs, so that both the lost and the saved can put into words who they were and who they are, and relive the moment of their death now translated into words. The fleeting references to individual deaths are many: among the most prestigious, that of Virgil, who tells Dante that his body, "within which I made shadow," was moved from Brindisi and lies buried in Naples; that of Beatrice, who accuses Dante of betraying her when she "was on the threshold / of my second age" (she died at the age of twenty-five); the terrible death of Count Ugolino, immured in the Tower of Hunger by his enemy Cardinal Ruggiero and condemned to die of starvation and devour his own children (according to Borges, in the historical reality he must have done one or the other, but in the poem he does both); the suicides in the bloody forest; the briefly announced death of Peter Damian; and that of Manfred discussed earlier.¹ The Commedia is an exercise not in death but in the memory of death. To know what awaits him, the mortal Dante asks questions of those who have undergone the experience of mortality. That is where his curiosity leads him.

There is

In the "awful place," Virgil tells him, he will see "the ancient suffering souls / each crying out for a second death," begging for the ultimate annihila­tion announced in the book of the Apocalypse (the Revelation of Saint John in the English-language canon).² According to its author, John of Patmos, onthat dreadful day the dead will arise to be judged, and will seek their name in the Book of Life: if it does not appear in the inconceivable pages, they are condemned to the flames for all eternity. "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire," says John. "This is the second death" (Rev. 20:14).

Allegorically, in Christian Europe, the iconography of Death has ancient roots: the animated skeleton represented, for example, in a Pompeian mosaic begins its first macabre dance in the early Middle Ages, calling all people to join him (or her, because in the Latin languages Death is a woman), the young and old, the rich and poor. This terrifying image of Death is not uni­versal. For instance, Yukio Mishima, writing in 1967, observed,

The Japanese people have always been conscious of the fact that death lies in wait behind all everyday actions. But their idea of death is straightforward and joyful. A different idea from the abominable and horrendous notion of death that foreigners have. The concept of a personified death in the guise of a skeleton carry­ing a scythe, like that imagined by the Europeans in the Middle Ages, did not exist in Japan. It is also different from the idea of death as lord and master that is prevalent in those countries where, to this day, next to modern cities and under the blazing sun, stand ancient ruins covered by a luxuriant vegetation. I mean those of the Aztec and Toltec people of Mexico. No, ours is not an aggres­sive death, but a sort of fountain of pure water from which streams are born that run endlessly throughout the world, and that, for a long time now, have nurtured and enriched the art of the Japanese people.³

Whether death is to be happily expected or tremblingly dreaded, the question remains: What lies beyond the last threshold, if threshold it is? Buddhists believe that the four noble truths taught by the Buddha provide an escape from the endless circle of dying and rebirth, a deliverance first experienced by the Buddha himself. After his death (or Parinibbana, mean­ing "all-round completion of earthly existence"), the Buddha continued to exist as what believers call "a presence in the absence." A later Buddha, the Maitreya or Metteyya, in order to enlighten his disciples about the world to come, composed a poetic text, The Sermon of the Chronicle-To-Be, announc­ing "five disappearances" that will follow the death of the last Buddha: "the disappearance of attainments, the disappearance of method, the disappear­ance of learning, the disappearance of symbols, the disappearance of relics." This multiple absence shall proclaim an age in which the truth will no longer be attainable by humankind. The end of all things shall see the last priest break the sacred precepts, the memory of the sacred texts fade, the vestments and attributes of the monks lose their meaning, and the destruction of all holy Buddhist relics by fire. "Then the Kappa or World-Cycle shall be anni­hilated," reads this solemn document.⁴

For the Zoroastrians, death is a creation of the Evil Spirit, Angra Mainyu. In the beginning, the world existed in two consecutive ages of three thou­sand years each, first in spiritual form, then in material form, before it was attacked by the Evil Spirit, who created disease to oppose health, ugliness to beauty, death to life. Three thousand years later, sometime between 1700 and 1400 b.c.e., the prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) was born in Persia, her­alding the divine revelation that would allow humankind to do battle against Angra Mainyu. According to the Zoroastrian sacred book, the Zend-Avesta, the present age will last another three thousand years from the date of Zoro­aster's death, at the end of which evil will be defeated for ever. Until then, each individual death leads a step closer to that blessed hour which Zoroas­trians call Frashokereti.⁵

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the earliest apocalyptic literature can be traced to the end of the fifth century b.c.e., when, according to the Tal­mud, classical Jewish prophecy came to an end with the last of the prophets, Malachi, Haggai, and Zechariah.⁶ But prophetic visions continued to be re­corded, no longer as an individual voice, with the prophet proclaiming his own name, but anonymously or under the borrowed names of ancient sages. With the exception of the book of Daniel, the rest of this new prophetic literature came to form part of the Aggadah, the Jewish corpus of mainly Talmudic texts that deals with nonlegal topics. Classical prophetic literature described events that would result from human misconduct and would take place when time came to an end, heralding an eternal Golden Age. These cataclysms would bring about the fall of heathen kingdoms, the redemption of the chosen people, the return from their exile to the Promised Land, and the establishment of universal peace and justice. While admitting these visions, the new prophets announced a battle: not only a mortal conflict between God's people and the unbelievers, but a vast otherworldly war be­tween the hosts of good and those of evil. In the early biblical prophecies, the Redeemer was God himself; the newer ones announced the coming of a Messiah whose nature would be both human and divine. These later pro­phetic writings were to nourish, of course, the nascent beliefs of the followers of Christ.

The Old Testament taught that a relationship with God is possible only during a person's lifetime. After death—the realm from which in the Jewish tradition language is excluded—all contact with the divine is severed. "The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence," wrote the Psalmist (Ps. 115:17). Whatever a person could do to please God had to be accomplished on earth or not at all. But during the first century b.c.e., dif­ferent, more hopeful notions began to thrive among the Jewish people. The existence of an afterlife, retribution for bad and good behavior, and the concept of the resurrection of the body (though all these, in rudimentary form, can be traced back to canonical texts) became fundamental tenets of Jewish belief. With them God's reach was reaffirmed even after the death of the flesh, and humankind was assured an immortality that lent tremendous importance to whatever a person did in the here and now. These ancient certainties, assimilated and transformed in successive exegetical readings cul­minating in the Apocalypse, are at the core of Dante's Commedia. For Dante, we, the living, are responsible for our actions and our life, on earth and be­yond, and we forge our own rewards and punishments as we travel along the road of life to our certain end. They constitute the fundamental declaration of the duty of the individual-to-be. For Dante, after life we are not con­demned to silence: the dead retain the gift of language so they may reflect through words on what came to pass.

Islam promises that after death there will be punishments for the mis­creants and rewards for believers. "For the unbelievers We have prepared chains and fetters and a blazing Fire. But the righteous shall drink of a cup tempered at the Camphor Fountain, a gushing spring at which the servants of God will refresh themselves: they who keep their vows and dread the far- spread terrors of Judgment day; who, though they hold it dear, give suste­nance to the destitute, the orphan, and the captive, saying: 'We feed you for God's sake only; we seek of you neither recompense nor thanks: for we fear from our Lord a day of anguish and of woe.'" This fear will prove fruitful: after the death of the body, God will reward believers with robes of silk, re­clining couches, shady trees, offers of fruit, silver dishes, and cups of ginger- flavored water served by eternally young boys sparkling like sprinkled pearls. In the twelfth century, Ibn 'Arabi explained that the condemned "shall be gathered in such ugly forms that apes and swine would look better." The ac­cumulation of wealth is an obstacle to eternal bliss: according to the Prophet's companion, Abu Huraryra, the Prophet said that believers who are poor will enter Paradise half a day before the rich.⁷

The Day of Resurrection, or Al-yawm al-qiyama (also called Al-yawm al-fasal, or Day of Sorting Out, and Al-yawm al-din, or Day of Religion), in which humankind shall bear witness against itself, is mentioned more specif­ically in sura 75 of the Qur'an. "On that day there shall be joyful faces, look­ing towards their Lord. On that day there shall be mournful faces, dreading some great affliction." The exact date of that awful event is not given (it is known only to God, and even the Prophet cannot change it), but on that day the dead will be resurrected, "whether you turn to stone or iron, or any other substance you may think unlikely to be given life." The Day of Resurrection will be announced by a number of major signs: the appearance of Masih ad- Dajjal, the false messiah; the desertion of Medina; the return of Isa (Christ in Islamic nomenclature), who will defeat Masih ad-Dajjal and all false reli­gions; the release of the tribes of Gog and Magog; the assault on Mecca and the destruction of the Kaaba; and the death of all true believers caused by a sweet southern breeze. At this time all the verses of the Qur'an will be for­gotten, all knowledge of Islam will fall into oblivion, a demonic beast will emerge to address the survivors, who will take part in a frenzied sexual de­bauch, a vast black cloud will cover the earth, the sun will rise in the west, and the angel Israfil will sound the first trumpet, causing the death of all living creatures. Finally, the second trumpet will sound, and the dead will be resurrected.⁸

The Spanish scholar Miguel Asfn Palacios argued that Islamic eschatol- ogy may have been known to Dante through Latin translations of the hadith made in Cordoba. Though Asfn Palacios's theories regarding Islamic influ­ences in the Commedia have been largely discredited, his critics have been forced to accept the possibility of "an intrusion of Islamic themes in medi­eval Christian religious thought." Once suggested, Asfn Palacios's basic argu­ment appears obvious: that from Al-Andalus (a civilization which fostered a fluid dialogue between the three cultures of Spain: Islamic, Christian, and Jewish) the Islamic texts, translated into Latin, could easily have traveled to the cultural centers of Italy, where they would have certainly attracted the attention of an omnivorous reader such as Dante. Notable among these texts is the Epistle of Forgiveness, a satirical excursion through heaven and hell written by the eleventh-century Syrian poet Abu l-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, which irresistibly evokes for a Western reader the conversational Otherworld of Dante's Commedia. In the Epistle, the author makes fun of an obscure and pedantic grammarian of his acquaintance, who, after death, having overcome the difficulties of otherworldly bureaucracy, engages in a dialogue with fa­mous poets, philosophers, and heretics from the past, and even speaks with the devil himself.⁹

Distinguishing the "second death" from the first, Islamic authors have argued that dying is the crowning, positive act of a true believer's life. A col­lection of writings from the tenth century penned by the anonymous mem­bers of an esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad known as the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Brethren of Purity or Sincerity, contains a text called "Why We Die" that describes the act of dying through a series of extended metaphors. The body is a ship, the world the sea, death the coast we are headed for; the world is a racecourse, the body a noble horse, death the goal where God is the king who gives out the prizes; the world is a plantation, life is the succes­sion of the seasons, the hereafter is the threshing floor that separates the grain from the chaff. "Therefore," reads the text, "death is a wise thing, a mercy, and a blessing, since we can only arrive at our Lord after we have left this physical structure and have departed from our bodies."¹⁰

No doubt the Islamic Day of Resurrection shares certain features of its Christian counterpart. According to Iranaeus, a leader of the Christian church in the second century, John of Patmos was granted his vision in the last years of the reign of Domitian, 95 or 96. Traditionally (and erroneously), John of Patmos is identified as John the Evangelist, Jesus's beloved disciple, who in his old age, it was supposed, retired to Patmos's rocky wilderness to put his vision into words.¹¹

John's Apocalypse is a haunting, mysteriously poetic text that portrays death not as the end but as a stage in the struggle between good and evil. It is structured around the numinous number seven: seven letters, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven visions, seven vials, and finally seven more visions. To the anguished question "What is to become of us?" John's book responded with a wealth of terrible images of "things that must shortly come to pass" (Rev. 1:1) and enticed readers to decipher them. The mysteries of revelation were depicted as closed book secured with seven seals, the promise of under­standing as an open book that the Angel gives John to eat, mirroring a met­aphor from the book of Ezekiel (2:10), in which the prophet is also given a book "written within and without: and there was written therein lamen­tations, and mourning, and woe." Thus the vision granted by God was both unintelligible (sealed) to the unbeliever and intelligible (ingestable) by those who believed. This is one of the oldest and most enduring images of the act of reading: devouring the text in order to apprehend it, making it part of one's own body.

The earliest known Latin interpretation of the Apocalypse was written in the fourth century by Victorinus, bishop of Pettau, in Styria (now Austria), who was martyred under the emperor Diocletian. Victorinus composed com­mentaries on the Bible, of which none survives except fragments of his read­ings of the first and last books, Genesis and the Apocalypse. Believing that the persecution suffered by the Christians was proof that the end of the world

An illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript of the Apocalypse depicting (top) the Beast and Dragon and (bottom) Worship of the Beast and Dragon. (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M.0524, fol. iov, 1. Photograph © The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY.)

was approaching, Victorinus saw in John's Apocalypse the announcement of contemporary events that were to culminate (he thought) a thousand years after the beginning of Christ's reign.¹²

Victorinus's reading proved convincing. Long after the year 1000, read­ers continued to interpret John's vision as a chronicle of present history. As late as 1593, John Napier, a Scottish mathematician who invented the decimal point and the logarithm, published A Pleine Discoverie of the Whole Revela­tion of St. John that echoed Victorinus's commentaries. Fiercely anti-Catholic, Napier developed in this book a timeline based on his reading of the Apoca­lypse. Using the defeat of the Spanish Armada as proof that God sided with the Protestant cause, he explained that the seventh and last age of history had started with a blast of the final trumpet in 1541, the year John Knox began the Scottish Reformation, and would end, according to his calculations, in the year 1786. Modern-day inheritors of these tidy readings are American evan­gelical revivalists such as Billy Graham who see in John's vision the threat or promise of Armageddon.¹³

But in the fourth century, Victorinus's historical reading of the Apoc­alypse was not found acceptable by the ecclesiastical authorities, especially in light of the growing power of the church after Constantine. The com­mentaries of Saint Jerome on the commentaries of Victorinus, though granting the martyred scholar a distinguished place among ecclesiastical writers, suggested that his interpretation was misguided and the Apocalypse required an allegorical, not a literal reading. Ingeniously, Jerome found a solution that embraced Victorinus's ideas but did not negate the present existence of the church triumphant. Jerome suggested that the Apocalypse presented a series of typological events that recurred throughout history, periodically reminding us that the Day of Judgment is nigh: the trumpets that began sounding in Babylon are sounding yet today. The second death still awaits us.¹⁴

In The City of God,, Saint Augustine seems to agree with Jerome's inclu- sionary interpretation. The Apocalypse, according to Augustine, reveals to its intended readers the history of the true church, and also their own personal conflicts, by means of a series of images that might seem baffling to some but that, read in the light of certain clarifying passages, speak to each reader of a private struggle to overcome the darkness and go towards the light. Augus­tine is severely critical of those who believe that the end of the thousand-year kingdom announces a bodily resurrection in order to enjoy "most unre­strained material feasts." This first resurrection, Augustine says, will enable those to whom it is granted "not only [to come] to life again from the death of sin, but [to continue] in this new condition of new life." Augustine con­cludes: "This coming to life again would have made them sharers in the first resurrection; and then the second death would have had no power over them."¹⁵ Dante's emergence from the dark forest and his pilgrimage to the final vision follows Augustine's reading.

Nourished by these commentaries, medieval Christian eschatologists as­sumed that death is not the end: there is an afterlife of the souls. But even that is not the final stage of being. The ultimate moment will come when the last trumpets are sounded and, in one final ordering, the souls will know the true conclusion to their stories. In expectation of a just retribution, true Christians were supposed to face their last moments with ritual equanimity, quietly trusting their soul to their Maker, the Aristotelian Supreme Good to whom all things must return.

According to the historian Philippe Aries, this meek attitude towards death can be traced to the end of the first millennium. Christian Europe conceived death as "domesticated"—that is to say, controlled by a system of rituals that allowed the dying person to be the conscious protagonist of his or her last moment.¹⁶ The agonizing person was supposed to await death with active resignation, placing the body in a preordained position, lying on the back with the face turned towards heaven, and accepting his or her partici­pation in conventional ceremonies that transformed the death chamber into a public space.

Death came to be understood as a consolation, a hopeful notion that prevailed until perhaps the skepticism of the Enlightenment; it was seen as a safe haven, a final resting place from the toils of life on earth. To the Islamic images of death as the longed-for harbor, the threshing floor after harvest, the finish line of a race, the Christian imagination added that of the inn, waiting at the end of life's journey. "Mad, my lady, is the traveler who an­noyed by the day's fatigues wants to go back to the beginning of the journey and return to the same place," we read in La Celestina, "for all those things in life that we possess, it is better to possess them than to expect them, be­cause nearer is the end when we have more advanced from the beginning. There is nothing sweeter or more pleasant to the weary man than an inn. So it is that, although youth be merry, the truly wise old man does not wish for it, because he who lacks reason and good sense loves almost nothing else but what he has lost."¹⁷

The end of the first millennium, according to Aries, marked yet another change in our dealings with death: the acceptance of the dead within the realm of the living. In ancient Rome, civic law forbade the burial in urbe, within the city walls. This convention changed, says Aries, not because of a reconsideration of European rituals but through the North African custom of venerating the remains of martyrs and burying them in churches, first on the outskirts of the city and then wherever the church stood.¹⁸ Church and graveyard became one and the same place, and part of the neighborhood of the living.

With the incorporation of the dead into the world of those still alive, the ritual of dying took on a double sense: an "acting out" of death, the perfor­mance of a first-person-singular Day of Judgment concluding with the end of "I," and a witnessing of that act by those who remain alive, who acquire the duty of mourning and of memory, and shift the paraphernalia of death into the realm of the erotic, as, for example, in the art and literature of the Romantic movement. Death acquired a gothic beauty. Edgar Allan Poe judged the death of a beautiful woman "unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."¹⁹

The industrialized societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tend to exclude death. Death in our time occurs in hospitals and nursing homes, far from the domestic or public eye. Death "becomes shameful and forbidden," argues Aries, hiding even from the patient the proximity of the final moment. And modern war, up to a point, deprives death of its singu­larity. The two world wars and the slaughters they engendered that continue up to this day made death plural, swallowing up each individual death in interminable statistics and conglomerate memorials. It was to this erasure by numbers that Christopher Isherwood referred when speaking to a young Jewish movie producer. Isherwood had mentioned that six hundred thou­sand homosexuals were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The young man was not impressed. "But Hitler killed six million Jews," he said sternly. Isherwood looked back at him and asked: "What are you? In real estate?"²⁰

In spite of dying offstage, in spite of dying anonymously or as part of a multitude, in spite of the possibility of consolation and the assurance of clo­sure, it seems that we still don't want to die absolutely. In 2002, Jeremy Webb, editor of the New Scientist, offered a prize to its readers: after the death of the winner, his or her body would be prepared and slowly cooled to an astonish­ingly low temperature at the Cryonics Institute of Michigan, where it would be held indefinitely in liquid nitrogen. "Though sperm, embryos, viruses and bacteria have been frozen and then returned to life, large volumes of flesh and bone and brain and blood present more of a challenge. There is no decay process, no biological action below -196° C," explained Webb. "The whole emphasis of cryonics is that you put yourself into deep freeze until technol­ogy has gained the expertise to bring you back."²¹

The questions "What is to become of us?" "Do we disappear forever?" "Can we return from the grave?" imply many different conceptions of death. Whether we conceive death as the last chapter or imagine it as the beginning of a second volume, whether we fear it because we can't know it or believe that beyond it lies retribution for our conduct on earth, whether we become prematurely nostalgic at the thought of no longer existing or empathize with those whom we'll leave behind, our picture of death as a state of being (or not being) determines our notion of death as an act, final or perambulatory. "Even if I am mistaken in my belief that the soul is immortal," wrote Cicero in the first century b.c.e. with unusual simplicity, "I make the mistake gladly, for the belief makes me happy, and is one which as long as I live I want to retain."²²

Beyond the impossible realization of our own death, as we grow older we are made persistently aware of the increasing absence of others. We find it hard to say good-bye. Every farewell haunts us with the secret suspicion that this might be the last; we try to remain waving at the door for as long as possible. We don't resign ourselves to definitive absences. We don't want to believe in the absolute power of dissolution. This incredulity is a consola­tion to believers. When Saint Bernard prays to the Virgin for Dante's salva­tion, he asks her to "scatter for him every cloud of his mortality with your prayers, / so that joy supreme may unfold for him."²³

Seneca (whom Dante certainly read but merely acknowledged with a single epithet, "moral Seneca," in the Noble Castle of Limbo) had studied the Greek Stoics but did not follow in his own life their excellent advice. In his writings, however, he notes with stoic sobriety that death must not frighten us: "It is not that we have so little time," he writes in banker's terms to his friend Paulinus, supervisor of Rome's grain supply, "but that we lose so much. Life is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious projects if we invest it all carefully."²⁴ These ideas, of course, were not new in the Rome of the first century c.E. Since the earliest times, the Romans had conceived of an afterlife conditioned by how well (or how badly) we had administered this one.

The idea that there is a sequel to this life, a continuum, an ingrained immortality, is beautifully summed up in an inscription collected in the Cor­pus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the great collection of Latin epitaphs: "I am ashes, ashes are earth, the earth is a goddess, therefore I am not dead."²⁵ Reli­gious dogmas, civil legislations, aesthetics and ethics, philosophies highbrow and low, mysticism: everything relies on this limpid syllogism.

If the dead do not vanish utterly, then it might be convenient to main­tain with them some sort of a relationship: a chance to speak with them and, above all, an opportunity for them to speak, as they do in the Commedia. The earliest literary examples of such dialogues can be seen in ancient tombstones inscribed with words attributed to the dead, like the ones mentioned by Dante after entering the infernal City of Dis.²⁶ Among the oldest tombs in the Italian landscape were those built by the Etruscans, elegantly decorated with festive funeral scenes and portraits of the departed. The Romans con­tinued the customs of the vanished Etruscan civilization by adding inscrip­tions to their tombstones. At first these merely either announced the name of the dead, praised the departed with sober words, and wished his or her souls a painless voyage to the next ("May the earth be light on you!") or po­litely addressed passing strangers ("Greetings, you who go by!"). Though brevity continued to be a feature of epitaphs, with time these became less conventional, more lyrical, simulating a conversation with the absent friend or relative, or establishing a link of common mortality between the dead and those still living. And yet, translated into words, the most heartfelt senti­ments and the deepest sorrow can become artificial. In the end, the epitaph became a literary genre, the elegy's younger brother.

In the first chapter of Giorgio Bassani's The Garden ofthe Finzi-Contini, a group of people visit an Etruscan cemetery north of Rome. A young girl asks her father why it is that tombs that are ancient make us less sad than more recent graves. "That is easily understood," says the father. "Those who have died recently are nearer to us, and precisely for that reason we love them more. While the Etruscans, they have been dead for so long that it is as if they never had lived, as if they had been dead forever"⁷

Whether near to us or far removed in time, the dead arouse our curios­ity because we know that, sooner or later, we will join them. We want to know how things begin, but we also want to know how they will end. We try to imagine the world without us, in a disturbing effort to conceive a story without a narrator, a scene without a witness. Dante ingeniously inverted the procedure: he imagined the world not without him but without the others, or, rather, with him alive and all the others dead. He granted himself the power to explore death from the point of view of the living, wandering among those for whom the final question has been dreadfully or joyously answered.