The Dark Wood

Dante Alighieri

“Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.”

                                                                                 Dante Alighieri  The Divine Comedy

Are there more powerful words to open the saga of a middle-aged man questioning everything in his life?  Dante was 35 years old in 1300 AD, and therefore half way to 70, which was an ancient life span at the time.  Most people died in their late 50s and early 60s.  Many others did not survive infancy.

It is the expression of it, the way the lines are written and translated—“I woke to find myself in a dark wood…”  We have all had mornings like this.  We may be having one right now, in the middle of a pandemic when nothing is as it used to be.

Then, Dante the character in the poem written by Dante the poet, is assailed by three beasts:  a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.  The leopard “sprang up,” “trim and very swift.”  Dante fixates on the leopard’s spots.  He calls the leopard a “gaudy beast.”  Next, he is confronted by a lion, proud and tall, “the air around him seemed to fear his presence.”  Finally, the she-wolf, “ racked with every kind of greediness.”  The female does not merit the kind of ferocious attributes of the leopard and the lion in an interesting bit of thinly disguised discrimination of the time.  She is the depraved one.

Dante was living in exile when he wrote The Divine Comedy, having been banished from his home when he was caught up in civil unrest and falsely accused of corruption and financial improprieties.  His assets were seized and he was ordered to pay a large fine, which he refused to do; so on pain of death he was ordered to never set foot in his city again.  Florence was his world, the cityscape and cultural life he loved.  Now, he was cut off, ostracized, labeled an absconder.  He was devastated, crushed.

We know that change is the way of this life yet people do not like it, they fear it even, and often resist with every fiber of their being.  But change happens and resistance to it is a waste of spirit.  We are all, occasionally, exiles in our own lives.  We cannot go back to the past; that is another country beyond our reach.  All we have is the now, the immediate moment.

We have been changed by COVID-19.  We cannot say we didn’t see this coming.  It is in every piece of apocalyptic fiction, countless films, dreamscapes, the pixelated playing fields of video games.  If you can dream of it, it is within the realm of the possible.  Beyond creatively imagining our end, there is science and its dire threats:  Ebola, HIV/AIDS, SARS, MRSA, H1N1—read The Coming Plague (Penguin, 1994) by Laurie Garrett.  She lays it out for us.  Virus and bacteria, microscopic as they are, have always hunted us.  But here’s the deal:  they want us alive at least long enough to shed as much virus as possible.  So these creatures keep mutating until they do not kill us outright.  Is this what COVID-19 is doing?  That seems to be what the scientists are saying.

So what we are confronted with here is not gaudy, proud and angry, or greedy.  Those are human attributes.  COVID-19 has no time for sentiment or emotion or human reasoning; it is simple-minded and focused.  It has one mission and one only:  infect everything.

Until science tells us more, offers a cure, a vaccine, or a mitigation pharmaceutical, we must keep social distancing.  We must wear the mask, glove up, and stay indoors away from loved ones and strangers.  That leaves us isolated and lets our minds wander to darker scenarios.  What if the life we know never returns?  The short answer is, it won’t, and we must deal with that.

Life is uncertain.  Life is fluid.  Our time here is brief when compared to the rocks that sleep in the earth.  The trees in the dark wood have been alive longer than us, and will remain long after we are gone.  We are only, in our limited life span, travelers through this land.

Change is death to the former world.  Change is where we must adapt and look for the light.  The fact that we will one day be gone gives our lives importance, it gives our lives heft, power and meaning.  As we fly through our dreams of chaos and carnivals, we will discover that change ultimately brings the future.

But to get there we must first navigate this dark wood.