I Found Myself Within A Forest Dark

When I was about fourteen or fifteen I picked a hefty volume off the shelf in my bedroom.  Like all the other books in the classics collection my parents had purchased for me when I was an infant, it was bound in leather with gilt etchings in the cover and golden page edges.  I have no idea why I chose The Divine Comedy over the other classics on the shelf like Wuthering Heights  or Robinson Crusoe, but I did.  For some reason the medieval poetry didn't stop me from reading through Inferno or Purgatorio, but somewhere I faltered in Paradiso, exhausted.  Like Franz Liszt, I suppose, all my energy had been spent trudging through the darker realms of Dante's afterlife and I couldn't put much effort into the final rewarding conclusion.  Sometime later, I returned to Paradise and finished it.  But, it was a disjointed reading.  Well over a decade later, I've returned to that same volume to begin again from the start.  "Midway upon the journey of our life..."

Alighieri's unparalleled work has had quite the influence on the world.  Some say he was greater than Shakespeare.  His original written dialect became modern Italian.  The images of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven directly created the common held views of those places today.  The Bible itself makes vague mention of the afterlife, so Dante has filled in the blanks for the human imagination.  The Divine Comedy is one of the most significant works of literature and has permeated the Western psyche.  For example, I often refer to visiting the grocery store as a journey through the rings of Hell.

But as I began my second reading another parallel struck me.  In a day or so we will be hosting some family members from the US.  We've had many visitors come and go from our house since our relocation, but this case is unique in that these visitors will be experiencing their first ever trip outside of the United States.  This is a huge life moment for all of them, and I can imagine in many ways it feels a lot like standing in the middle of a dark forest wondering where to go.  Of course, here the parallel abruptly ends.  In no way can I compare a brief tour through the region to traveling through any part of the afterlife, let alone Hell.  But, thinking back to the first time I ever left home for some place more exotic than Niagara Falls, I do remember a sense of great trepidation, even fear.

There is nothing like one's first trip.  It's an experience that can never be repeated or compared to.  Everything, from going through customs to encountering "foreign" bed linens is a new and exciting experience.  While you feel like a fish out of water, you can't help but look forward to what's around the bend.  It's a rush, and at the end of the journey, brief or long, you find yourself a different person.  For many of us who keep planning trips, we're after that feeling of another scary thrill and the rewarding feeling at the end.  We never find the same one we had the first time we set foot off the plane.  But, the beautiful thing about travel is, it always provides that sought after new experience.  No matter how it goes down, we always come back a little more enlightened than before.

I have to admit, I'm very excited to be apart of someone's first step down the unlit path.  While we're certainly no Virgil, it is an honor so serve as guides.  It will be our first time serving that capacity to virgin travelers.  I expect that to be an experience in and of itself.  Hopefully, no one's journey over the next 10 days is anything like a Canto from The Divine Comedy, unless it is from Paradiso, of course.  My desire is for everyone to have a trip for which they are grateful to have taken when they "walked out once more beneath the stars."

No matter what happens, I'm sure to have a list of do's and don'ts to share with those who may be playing Virgil in the future.