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- [00:00]
A
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking to author and bard professor Joseph Luzi. Dante's Divine comedy, written around 1321, truly changed Joseph's life. Today I'm asking him why.
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B
This is old school.
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A
Joseph Lutzy. Welcome to old school.
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B
Happy to be here.
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A
When you heard an episode of Old School, you wrote to me and said, you know, I've got a story that I think you'd be interested in. And I read your story, and it's extraordinary. So what I'd like to do is just begin this episode in an unconventional way by first getting you to tell us the personal story that set you up so that Dante's Inferno could guide, change, console, and in a way, reinvigorate your life. What is that story? What happened to you?
- [01:04]
B
Well, first of all, thank you. It's a thrill and an honor to be here. I had always felt that deep love and passion for literature. I dedicated. You know, I'm a professor of literature. I. It's what I do for a living. And I was always so drawn to books. But then, 18 years ago, in 2007, my wife, Catherine was eight and a half months pregnant. And when she left the house one morning in November, she had a fatal car accident. And 45 minutes before she died, she was eight and a half months pregnant. She gave birth to our daughter, who was rescued by an emergency Caesarean. So I wasn't in the car. I had left the house that morning to go teach around eight, and as I would write in a book about it, I left the house at 8, and by noon I was a widower and a father. It happened so quickly, so suddenly. And as you can imagine, that sent me into the deepest grief that completely upended my life. And I needed guides, I needed help. Help came in different forms. I come from a large, loving Italian family. You know, my mom, who's almost 80, jumped in to help me raise my daughter Isabel. But I also needed kind of spiritual help and emotional guidance. And unexpectedly, the author that I had dedicated my life to studying Dante, I heard his voice in a way I never heard it before. Dante himself had one of those life altering moments. His was exile from the city he loved. He spent the last 20 years of his life dislodged from Florence, desperate to return, uncertain of his future, probably at every step of the way. And he ended up leaving us a gift. Somehow in the midst of all that, the Divine Comedy, which he spent roughly the last 14 years of his life writing. Suddenly, the Divine Comedy came through to me with a clarity and force that was overwhelming. I heard Dante's exilic strains. I heard his trauma, his heartache, and it became, for me, a kind of guide out of what I called the dark wood. You know, Dante talks about the dark wood in his writing. I was living it. Dante lived it in some way. Everyone ends up in that crisis point.
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A
And.
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B
And for me, the Divine Comedy became the kind of guide to get out of grief, into mourning and rejoin the living.
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A
You know, I think people have heard the term Divine Comedy. Inferno is a kind of pop culture term, even. But I don't know that folks know exactly what this poem is. So could you just. For somebody who's never read the Divine Comedy, what is this book about and what is it?
- [04:20]
B
Yeah, Dante has the melancholic status of being one of the most famous, yet least read of all the greats. I mean, everyone's heard of him. You're right. It's part of pop culture, especially Inferno. You know, you'll see hot sauces with the word Inferno on them. I've heard that, you know, the seating plan of Southwest Airlines and IKEA's aisles have been compared to Inferno. It's part of pop culture. But do people actually read it? It's a very demanding book. It was written 700 years ago. Dante wrote it roughly 1306 to 1321. So roughly the last 14, 15 years of his life. And it's the story of a human soul. It's an epic poem in the tradition of Homer and Virgil, the story of a human soul's journey through the afterworld, through hell, purgatory and heaven. And it's three books or three canticles. Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradiso. And people know Inferno the most because the most famous. But to really, to just think about Inferno is to have an incomplete picture of Dante, because Inferno is the realm of punishment. It's the dramatic realm, it's the realm of fire and brimstone and appeals to the popular imagination. But it's really Purgatory and Paradiso where Dante's vision takes hold. Because it's not a poem about punishment. It's not a poem about damnation. It's a poem about hope. It's a poem about rehabilitation. And ultimately, it's arguably the only epic poem that ends on a note of joy, with the human soul achieving its goal. Dante basically has a vision of the divine at the end of Paradiso. So it's remarkable the Barriers to entry to it are quite high. Dante had the most. Of all the authors that I study, his erudition is the most staggering. He knows the Bible, he knows the ancient world, he knows contemporary medieval world, he knows politics, he knows history, he knows music, he knows science. And he weaves it all together into this, what my advisor in graduate school, Giuseppe Mazzotto, called an encyclopedic poem. The reality is, though, is that Dante did not write just for the elite. Dante wanted his work to be read. He wrote it in Tuscan, which was quite risky if you think about it, because had he written it in Latin, he would have had the entire educated readership of Europe would have access to it. Writing in Tuscan was amazingly risky because only people in this small slice of Italy could have read it. But for Dante to write a poem about something as the stakes being so high, the state of the soul after death, it couldn't be in just a language limited to the scholars A and B. He was trying to create a living culture in Italy to rival the ancients.
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A
The premise, as you put it, is that Dante is on a journey.
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B
Yeah.
- [07:33]
A
And he has a number of guides. Virgil, Beatrice. And when we say Virgil, we mean the great classic figure, Virgil, you know, and, and, and, and he's, he's stewarded through and seeing these extraordinary places and it's really beautiful. On the one hand, Dante wrote for everybody. On the other hand, there's a high barrier of entry to the Divine Comedy. I wonder if you might give advice to a listener who wants to start this thing for themselves, but doesn't have Joseph Luzi sitting in their living room. Is there something they can do? To begin with this book?
- [08:11]
B
Yes, I would say the first thing is surrender to it. Accept that you're not going to understand all of it. Listen to the poetry as though you were listening to a song or a piece of classical music or something beautiful. Just let the poetry wash over you and understand that you're not going to get every detail. I teach it almost every year. I'm still always learning new things about it, but try and keep sight of the whole. That's what I tell my students. If you understand that this is a poem about a man who was exiled, who lost everything, who was once one of the highest ranking members of Florentine society, and then spent the last 20 years of his life largely impoverished, cut off from the people he loved, from the city he loved, and, and this is his sort of heartfelt attempt to reconstruct a broken world, then you get it Right. Then you can sort of make it through the references to medieval Florentines that you've never heard of. And that's okay. I say, you don't have to understand it all. Keep sight of the broader picture. And then I say pick out moments in the poem, pick out the highlights. Inferno 5, Paolo and Francesca, the Damned Lovers. Inferno 10, Dante's encounter with the Patriarchs of his city. Inferno 26, the Ulysses Canto. Start there and then build around those. It's not like reading the Sun Also Rises or the Great Gatsby. You know, you can kind of take that in magnificent novels, but they're more accessible. This is a different kind of species in literary terms.
- [09:54]
A
So I first read this novel about age 22. I did a great books major in school. And I wanted to ask you about Dante in that larger Western canon because this was at St. John's College and there's, you know, you read Plato and Aristotle and John Locke and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Frederick Douglass. I mean, the greats, the greats. Dante is on that list. So we spend a considerable. And I was 22 years old, so I want people out there to know. 22 year old Shiloh took Joseph Lutzy's advice and just picked that thing up and just looked at it. But what, you know, what is the. Why is the Divine Comedy considered a great book? And if we don't want to use that term, that's fine, but we could at least use this term, a touchstone of Western literature. Why is it that? What is it about it?
- [10:42]
B
I think it's because Dante does three particular things that really make him an inflection point in literary history. One, he kind of, he represents that transition from what we could call ancient to modern literature, right? You have this great ancient literary tradition. You have Homer, you have Virgil, you have the epics, you have Horace, this, you know, the Greek philosophical tradition. And then you have a writer who's so cognizant of that tradition and writing an epic self, consciously gesturing towards Homer and Virgil at the same time, modernizing it, making about not the founding of a city, not a great, you know, not a war, but about a self. Now, it's not autobiographical in our modern sense because he wasn't that kind of writer, but it is about one person. And so Dante takes the epic tradition and personalizes it in the language of a modern society, the vernacular. So that's sort of, that's the one reason why it's, it's a kind of beginning of modern literature. So I Say, that makes it one of the things. The second thing is that Dante's sense of linguistic experimentation, his sense of linguistic brilliance, you know, the character is so appealing. But if you look back at history, the poets have all so often turned to Dante. The modernists like T.S. eliot, Yeats, you know, in the Renaissance, the Petrarch was sort of wrangling with Dante's ghost. So many, many modern poets in Dante's Milton, so many stretches of Paradise Lost or in dialogue with Dante. So many poets since him have gone back and I think chosen Dante as a kind of touchstone, a sounding board. So there's that sense of that he's insinuated in the DNA of subsequent poetry. And the third thing is, if you think about it, what Dante does is he writes an autobiography in the form of an epic poem.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I mean, who had done that before? No one had done that. And so, you know, the way I tell my students is, even if you don't like those generative works, and you may not, that's completely everyone's decision, understand that that's where so many other works are coming from. And that's why I think one has to study Dante to get a sense of Western literature.
- [13:15]
A
The word of the day is vernacular. Joseph mentioned this when he told us that the Divine Comedy was written in the vernacular. What that means is that it's written in informal language. Rather than writing the Divine Comedy in poetic Latin, Dante writes the Divine Comedy in Italian. And especially the Italian vernacular, which is the informal language of the people, with all of its regionalisms and all of its slang and all of its colloquialisms. There's a few great examples of this in literature. One would be Machiavelli. His fellow Italian writes the chapter headings of his prints in Latin, but the text of the print itself is written in common Italian. Another great example would be the translation efforts of Luther, who took the Greek and Hebrew Bible and famously translated it into the German vernacular so that ordinary people could read the Bible vernacular. This is old school. And here we have an appreciation for old school. Quality, craftsmanship, how things used to be made. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. VER is now the largest independent watch assembler in the US building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. I absolutely love the watch these guys sent me. It's beautifully made and it feels Substantial on my hand, it genuinely lives up to the reputation they've built. Ver has over 10,000 five star reviews. And once you wear one, you're going to understand why. The materials are top grade, the construction is rock solid and it's durable enough that I can swim with it. Yet it still has a luxury feel. I get compliments on it all the time. If you're tired of disposable products and want something rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to Vere watches.com that's a v a E R watches and support American craftsmanship. Take us through two things. One, your own journey through Purgatory, Inferno and paradise. And parallel that with Dante's journey through Purgatorio, Inferno and Paradisio. Show us how this book guided you.
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B
So the way I talked about. I wrote a book called In a Dark Wood. What Dante taught me about grief healing and the mysteries of love. The way I talked about it then was that for me, Inferno was grief. I don't know if it was Freud or some other thinker to describe grief as a kind of illness that no one can see. You can't see someone limp or they don't manifest signs of physical pain. But there's something. Joan Didion called it magical thinking. Something is really broken inside and you're grappling with something and it was almost like. Almost like a fog, like you're not quite in your usual right frame of mind in grief. And to me, that was hell, Inferno or the underworld. You know, the way Virgil talks about the underworld is this melancholic place of the dead and conversing with the dead. Purgatory is about work in Dante. It's the most human of all three Canticles. Human. Time is reclaimed. Human. You have to climb up Mount Purgatory. You have to expiate your sins. And for me, that was a metaphor for mourning. Mourning is work. You have to. I believe it's Freud in Mourning and Melancholy says in a way, you kind of have to disassociate yourself from the dead and rejoin the living. And it's painful because part of you doesn't want to. Part of you wants to stay with the dead, but you can't if you want to get your life back together and rebuild your life. And in some ways it's. I don't want. More difficult in the sense that grief. You're just kind of knocked out, out of commission. Mourning is work, is climbing that mountain. Paradiso, I wrote in my book, and I believe we don't know it on Earth, but we can catch glimpses of it. I was lucky enough to be able to rebuild my life, to remarry, to have more children, and to get a second chance at life. I won't call it Paradiso is the afterworld, and this is this world. But there was a kind of part two in my own life where I think it relates to Dante is going back to Inferno. What's the inscription on the gate of hell? La chate ogni speranza. Abandon all hope, ye who enter. I think that's the key. You have to maintain hope. Hope is a kind of orientation to the future. If you are hopeful, you will believe that things in the future can turn around. You sort of see a future when you're in despair, the absence of hope. That future becomes clouded and elusive and remote. I tried desperately to hang on to hope and to realize what Dante realized at the gates of hell, that it was not true. There are people who go to hell and come out. Jesus, Aeneas, Odysseus, in the Odyssey.
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A
Right.
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B
You can go to the underworld and leave it. And if you maintain that hope, that sense of orientation to the future. And. And for me, I think before I started reading Dante, this idea, the poem begins, nel menzo del camin di nostra vita mi ri trovae per una selvo scura. In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood. I believe now that it's not what lands you in the dark wood that defines you, but what you do to get out of it. And I think that's Dante's message. And I also think that's why the poems. It's written for Christians, of course. I mean, it's a Christian poem.
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A
We should talk about that later.
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B
Everyone. Everyone ends up in the.
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A
So take me back to where you left off in your story when you started. So, you know, your wife passes away in this tragic car accident. This. The baby is saved. You know, what were you feeling in the immediate aftermath? You know, you've talked about a kind of disorientation and grief. You know, what were the specifics of that journey? Such that one day it clicked for you and you thought, you know, I'm living a kind of spirit spiritual divine comedy. These details in my life are the structure of this book. Can you tell us that story?
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B
Yes. I think what happened to me was that I never planned. You only understand these things after the fact.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Okay. Because when it's happening, you're living it. And so what happened was that I'll start with when I first heard Dante. A lot of people think Dante's Divine Comedy is a love story for Beatrice. Now, he does love her. She is his guide. But to really. That's an earlier book, the Vita Nuova, which is Dante's new life, where he's a young man and Beatrice becomes his muse. That's a more kind of romantic, erotic story, not in our traditional sense, but in a kind of spiritual sense. The Divine Comedy, I came to understand and I believe was Dante's response to exile, trauma of losing Florence. It takes you by surprise, of course. Dante's living his life. He's at the top of his game. He's the leading politician. He was the highest elected official in the city at one point. He's a famous poet in his hometown. And then suddenly the rug is swept under his feet, and it's like you fall through a trap door. That's what happened to life, and that's what happened to me. I was living my life. I was married. I had a job that I loved. I was. You know, things were great, and then suddenly they weren't. And they really weren't in a deep, visceral way. That's not something anyone could ever prepare for. So when I say grief, I mean this sense of disorientation where you're just dealing, it was shocking. It was truly a shock as I came out of it, as I worked hard to rebuild, and then as my life got back on track, I realized that Dante had been with me every step of the way. First, that sense of disorientation connected to Dante's exile, then reengaging with the poem on a personal level, seeing how the journey of the soul through Inferno, Purgatory, into Paradiso was very similar to what I was experiencing as someone who had been to the degree zero of his own life and then slowly rebuilt it through hard work and all the pain, but also a lot of support. And by the time my life was basically back on track, I realized something. I had been kind of writing two books in my mind. I had written because one of the effects of the tragedy was that I was a pretty typical academic in that I'd written deeply researched notes with a lot of footnotes and academic presses. I'd always wanted to write for a broader audience. And then when something like that happens, you realize how fragile life is. And I was like, I gotta go for it.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I thought I would write a grief narrative, and then I also thought I'd write a popular book about Dante. And I Realized all along I'd been writing one book because it was my love for Dante that got me back in the classroom right away.
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A
Part of the point that I try to make in my own work and on this show is the experience that you've had is not exclusive to people who are studying literature. A book that you pick up off the shelf, a book that you see on your way through the airport to go somewhere else, a book that you stumble upon or that your friend is reading or that you hear about on a podcast or on a tv, that could be the book that is the one that gets you over the hump. And it so happened that you were in close, intimate connection with Dante. I can think of countless times in my life when I have not been in that close a connection with an author, and yet I pick it up and I see some truth about my own life in it. That's what's beautiful about what happened to you.
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B
I couldn't agree more. For me, great literature, powerful works of art, help us find the right questions when we're grieving or suffering. And that's what the book's about. I hope people get a love for Dante. I hope it's an introduction to Dante. I shared my story along the way, but what I really wanted to hope people would take from that is that these towering works of literature are the ultimate guides for us, especially when we face life's great challenges. And you don't have to be a scholar, you don't have to be a specialist. You have to be a human being.
- [24:27]
A
There was an article written about you and The Guardian about 10 years ago. Yes. And either you sent it to me or somebody else sent it to me. And it talks about how at the beginning, you had this baby. And I believe the baby was, at least for a period of time in the Guardian, raised by your. Your mother. Is that right?
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B
Yes.
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A
And then you, as you've already mentioned, remarried, and the baby came into your house soon. You're. It's a daughter, right? It's now.
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B
Yes.
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A
Gotta be 18.
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B
18.
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A
Yes. Or so years old at this point, and a new family. And you and your wife have another child. And so I'm. Three more. Three, okay. Three more children. At that time, in the photo, there was just one, but there's been many more, which is so. So clearly there's been this. I assume this is the. Although paradise can't exist on earth, and you've said that, and that's obviously true. This would be the metaphorical association with paradise that you did find a family, that the darkness that you were plunged into, you had lost your wife. You weren't even sure if you were going to raise your own daughter. I'm sure this was very confusing. Resulted in what, by all external appearances, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is a healthy, happy, unified family, which you probably could not have imagined when that tragedy struck. So I want to hear not just about the tragedy, but about the redemption and how Dante informed that part of it, too.
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B
So, you know, Dante was very much invested in this Christian concept called grace, this idea that grace is sort of like when you're just. You're on the receiving end of some miraculous gesture of love from God. Dante was the recipient of grace in that he was in life's dark wood. He was struggling. And then Beatrice, Beatrice in the Italian pronunciation, went all the way to the.
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A
Top, to the Virgin Mary, who is Beatrice.
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B
Beatrice was a Florentine noblewoman that Dante loved when they were young. They were roughly the same age. And it's in writing about her that he became a poet. And that's the story of his first book, the Vita Nuova, the New Life. Okay, okay. So Dante's Beatrice, after she dies tragically in 1290, when she's about 24, 25, she ends up in the fiction of the Divine Comedy, going to the Virgin Mary, you know, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and Beatrice, giving Dante the grace to go on and take this journey and save his soul. Now, to take that out of religious context, when the woman who profiled me in the Guardian, Joanna Moorhead, said something beautiful. She said, you know, you were rescued by three ladies. And she mentioned Isabel, my daughter, my mom, Yolanda Luzi, who passed away at 90 a couple years ago, and my wife, Helena Bailey, who's a. She really came in and remarkably understood the situation that I had been separated from, from fatherhood, by grief. I mean, my mom did a lot of the heavy lifting, and I was there. But, you know, it was an unusual situation because suddenly I was a widower, and I had this child, and I needed help to raise her. And Helena came in and rebuilt our family, you know, through her love, wisdom.
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A
And.
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B
Generosity of spirit. And we've been blessed to have three additional children. So, you know, it's. There's been a second act, and I'm truly grateful for that, and I know I'm blessed. And so I would say, to put it in Dante's terms, that my personal story, the Grace, we'll call it, with a small G, you know, in a Non religious sense was the blessing of finding the right person. The Divine Comedy is about the need for guides that you can't make it alone in life. And my story is no different.
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A
I want to ask you about a passage you wrote in your book, which is really beautiful, and then ask you what it means. You wrote this, you say that Dante quote taught me that you can love somebody without a body in a certain way, but that you must reserve your truest love for somebody whose breath you can hear and feel. Your child's, your wife's, and that you may visit the underworld, but you cannot live there. Explain that thought to me.
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B
I think it's that. I think we've all met, encountered people like this who understandably can't get over a death. And it could be for various reasons. And our heart goes out to them. And there's a truly heartbreaking situations. In my case, I felt that I had to. It wasn't just me involved. I had a daughter, I had to rebuild our family. I didn't have the option of, you know, staying locked in the past, in the tragic, within the tragedy. I had to somehow get past it in some way. Not forget it, of course, but incorporate it into my life going forward. And that, that would mean starting something new, building a new family, starting a new life. And I mean that in the profoundest sense. It wasn't just a new family and that I remarried and had more children. But even professionally, even spiritually, in a way, you become a different person. You know, if I look at my life before the accident and after, there is a sense of before and after. Of course, no one wants to go through that because it's, it's visited on you from. It's an awful thing, force majeure from without. But I knew that there were certain things I had to let go of, certain things I had to embrace. You can't stay with the dead, you know, you have to rejoin the living. And that's where that whole idea of purgatory and work comes in. It's not easy because it's humbling. And you were once here and suddenly you're way down there and you've got to scramble to get back to par and then hopefully move forward.
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A
This is a Christian book and much of your language has. I mean, you're not talking about it in a religious sense, but I wonder if you might reflect for just a moment on the legacy of the inferno, of the Divine Comedy as a whole. The inferno seems in particular on modern Christianity, because it seems, you know.
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B
People.
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A
Who are Christians, I think, would agree in some ways with what you say, even though you're speaking in poetic rather than strictly Christian language. And so I'm trying to kind of put those two things together.
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B
I don't think they're exclusive. I think that, you know, there was a great debate in the early centuries after Dante wrote the Divine Comedy. Was he a poet or theologian? In other words, was he a poet who had this remarkable skill and created this divine poem using his knowledge of theology, but essentially writing as an artist, or was in the tradition of, say, like St. Paul or these great religious figures where he had a vision, a kind of rapture, and he just set it down. Everyone has to decide on their own. The contemporary sense is that he's more of a poet inflected by theology than having the straightforward Christian vision. But I think you can have both. I don't think you have to be a Christian for the poem to resonate with you. Of course. Of course. That's the DNA of the poem.
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A
No question. To give people a feel for the poem. Is there a passage that you might want to read, just a short one that we could just, you know, discuss and connect to some of the things you've been saying?
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B
Sure. I'll read you my favorite passage in the poem. It's just nine lines.
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A
Okay.
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B
And it's from Paradiso.
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A
All right.
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B
A very oft untraveled work, for reasons of its doctrine, its abstract language, but I think is actually poetically the most beautiful of all of Dante. And this is right towards the end of the poem. This is Paradiso25. So you gotta figure at this point, Dante's written, we'll say, 92 cantos. He knows he's written a masterpiece. Word is out that this poem is remarkable. He probably understands that it's gonna guarantee him a level of immortality, artistic immortality. He dies soon after finishing the Divine Comedy. And, you know, where do you go from the Divine Comedy? What's the sequel to it? It's tough to imagine. So in Paradiso 25, the normally tough Dante, he was known for being politically outspoken. He was known for being. Didn't suffer fools lightly. He. He was very proud. He lets down his guard a bit, and he sort of lets you know what writing this poem has taken from him. So this is right towards the end of Divine comedy. Okay. Paradiso25. Can I read the Italian? Nine lines in the Italian? Se my continga quel poema sacro al qualia postomano eccello e terra si che Mi affatto penmoltiani macro vinca la cru delta que fuormisera del bello ville o vio dormaniello nemico hay lupi que li dano guerra con altra voccio mai con altro vello ritornero poeta en sulfonte del mio bateismo prendero il capello. I'll read you the Hollander translation. Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem, to which heaven and earth have both set their hand, so that it has made me lean for many years, should overcome the cruelty that locks me out of the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, foe of the wolves at war with it with another voice, then with another fleece shall I return a poet. And at the font where I was baptized, take the laurel crown. It's an amazing passage because you see, he's calling it the sacro poema. He knows he's written something extraordinary, sacred poem. And in Italian, when you say poesia, it's like little poem. Poema is grand poem. So there's that kind of self consciousness of the importance of his own work, which is hard earned. But then also look at the kind of vulnerability in his voice. So that it has made me lean for many years, you know, Permoltiani macro bent. You know, this poem is literally weighed on my shoulders. Should overcome the cruelty that locks me out of the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb. That's Florence. That's his lost city, the fair sheepfold. And listen to. I tell my. Listen to the Italian, even if you don't know Italian. Belloville, oviodormallo. You hear those soft womb, like V's and L sounds. That's how much losing Florence pains him. It was his home. It's like he's a child again. And you hear it sonically there in those lines, the fair sheepfold. Then I will go back as a poet and take the laurel crown. Only there. And it shows you that this is now over a decade into exile. At least he still feels the pain of losing his home. And no matter what he says that I'm a citizen of the world, I'm this, I'm that. It hurts. And it's true. Dante doesn't get back to Florence and he is celebrated throughout Italy. There was a poet from Bologna, a kind of disciple, who revered him and was like, you know, these honors that you're seeking. Bologna feels that but for Dante it had to be Florence. And I think those lines here you can kind of feel the plaintive lament of that line, you know, bello ville o vio Dormaniello, the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb. That's why poets worship Dante, that sense of the visceral sound conveying the meaning.
- [36:54]
A
Of let's take a step back from Dante now in the time we have remaining and talk about the humanities more broadly. The humanities are in decline in the university in the sense that faculty who teach them are not being replaced, students are not enrolling in the courses, programs are being cut. Some people say this is self inflicted. I had people often ask me, what is the reason for the success that you. That I have had teaching. I've had courses with hundreds and hundreds of students in them. One of the reasons is that I read the books as a person who's trying to learn from them and with them and, and, and read them as a kind of education for my soul rather than an object of academic or intellectual or scholarly inquiry. Especially with undergraduates. Yeah, that's not what we're here to do. We're here to expose you to the riches of humanistic thinking rather than make you somebody who can write a journal in this, a journal article. Why do you think the humanities have not embraced that? Even if they have, you can say they have, but it seems to me they have not embraced that very power that they have to redeem, to affect lives, that kind of thing in the university, to save themselves.
- [38:13]
B
It's a great question. It's a question that I think about constantly. I would say two things. I think that the humanities. I know that people use the word decline. I prefer to use the word crisis because I think crisis implies there's a solution and that there's a way out. I do think we're in crisis. And I do think part of the crisis, just to contextualize a little bit, is because of the success of the humanities. Departments of literature, modern literature, not ancient, struggled for a long time to establish their kind of legitimacy within the university structure. If you go back into the 19th century, and then that meant getting serious, that meant getting rigorous, that meant publishing deeply researched articles and books. And I think that was ultimately for the good because it did establish the legitimacy in higher education of advanced literary study. That being said, we face a challenge now. We do have declining enrollments in general. We do have people questioning the value, as colleges get more and more expensive, of a hyper specialized literary degree. We're drawn to these books because we're drawn to beautiful writing, we're drawn to complex ideas. We're drawn to intellectual depth, let's respond to them in the same way. Why not? Instead of deadening interest in a subject with a hyper technical language, let's try and find a style that responds to the original. Let's write with kind of elegance and clarity and bring people in. Let's think of we love stories, narratives. Let's use some of the same tools that we've discovered in these works, be storytellers. I know we have to kind of stick to producing knowledge and respond to them in as rigorous a way as possible. But I don't think that excludes making a piece of scholarship readable. I don't think that excludes making a work of scholarship sort of an entry point rather than a closed door. Think about it. Some of the greatest scholars, like Eric Auerbach, wrote this book Mimesis, the study of reality and literature starting in antiquity, all the way to Virginia Woolf. I believed he was in exile in Turkey. He didn't have all his usual resource materials. It's one of the greatest books in the history of literary criticism and scholarship. I say we need. Now this is a challenge point. We need to. People love these books. Undergraduates love them. Graduate students devote their career to them. The public is interested in. Let's build on that love. Let's make these work without compromising our standards in any way, without making it less rigorous in any way. Let's make these books. We have to kind of invite people into them. Now, I think that's the great challenge. So that means being more publicly minded in the humanities. That means being open to different scholarly approaches. I don't have all the answers, but I do believe business as usual is not a good idea. It's not going to work at this point.
- [41:29]
A
So you're saying, you know, open it up to more forms of writing, forms of introduction to the humanities. The scholarly stuff is fine. Have it too, but let's have some other things.
- [41:37]
B
The other stuff could be just as scholarly.
- [41:39]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:40]
B
Sometimes I'll pick up a professional journal and there'll be a writer that I'm not a specialist in, but I want to learn more about. I should be with my, you know, as a PhD, as a professor of literature. Well, just someone who's in the biz.
- [41:51]
A
Yeah.
- [41:51]
B
And you're in the business. I'm in the biz. I should be able to get some traction there. More often than not, I cannot.
- [41:58]
A
Yeah, that's.
- [41:59]
B
And I think that the key is how do we bring back a response to the text that is consonant with what brought Us in language, narrative, ideas, complexity, and not just apply a paradigm to them. It worked for a long in the sense that created that legitimacy. I think now we need to shift gears and find new ways of talking about and writing about these.
- [42:32]
A
Well, I have many students in graduate school who I will refer to this clip because I think you've put it quite well, what you've just said. You have time for a quick lightning round. Of course you're interested in an expert in Italian film. What is a must see Italian film for our viewers?
- [42:47]
B
Oh, gosh, okay. I would say the film film that really kind of changed my career and it's a little off radar is Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy or Voyage to Italy as you sometimes see it, from the early 1950s. It's his first film after Neorealism, which was a kind of documentary style movement chronicling Italy's rebuilding after World War II. Journey to Italy or Voyage to Italy, however you find it, is about a wealthy British couples journey to the south of Naples and they're settling a will and along the way their marriage is coming under strain and sort of unraveling. But the book is this extreme. It was very influential in the French new wave. It was one of the most sort of consequential films really ever made. And it's to me, it's about Italian culture looking back at the people who've objectified it for centuries. You know, people love to make Italy into a kind of museum. Shelley, the British poet, said Rome is a city of the dead, even though there were hundreds of thousands of whatever people living there. And to me, this book shows Italian culture. Looking back, it's a remarkable film.
- [44:03]
A
Best Italian food.
- [44:05]
B
Oh, gosh, my late mom's homemade bread.
- [44:09]
A
Ah, I like to hear that. Greatest Italian novel. We recently did an episode on the Leopard. But I'm curious what the greatest Italian novel is.
- [44:17]
B
I would say if I had to recommend two Italian novels for everyone to read, one would be the Leopard because it's the story of the unification of Italy. And the other one would be Italy's first truly great modern novel, the Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni from the early 1800s. It's the. As Lukac, the great critic once said, it's the universal history of Italy. Its struggle with foreign occupation, its quest for a unifying language, tension between church and state, and its sort of eternal class struggle of the poor against the wealthy. It's a remarkable book.
- [44:54]
A
When folks go to Italy, what is the must see work of Italian fine art? You Got to see this one.
- [45:00]
B
I would say go to the Uffizi and go into the Sala Botticelli, the Botticelli room, and look at a painting of his called the Cestello Annunciation, in which you see the Virgin Mary receiving word from Gabriel that she's about to have the, you know, the Son of God. And she's almost dancing or swaying. It's the most remarkable piece because this is such a tried and true religious trope. And yet here she is in sort of Renaissance, almost pagan movement in this kind of classically beautiful Madonna. I think to me, that sums up what the Renaissance represents. And it's where I really first saw the Renaissance and felt it. Yeah.
- [45:48]
A
Academics always think they have a lot to teach non academics. What's the one thing academics should learn from non academics?
- [45:56]
B
I think one misconception about non academic writing is that it's somehow easier and more simple than academic writing. It's not. It's actually extremely difficult to. You're not writing, you know, Wikipedia entries when you write these books. You have to somehow find a way to write about a subject that avoids cliche, that avoids the obvious, that avoids just churning out existing information and say, the complex in a simple form. And that's actually extremely difficult and takes years of hard work and heartache and sweat. And I think that's the one thing I would communicate. And I invite academics to take that journey because I think we need it in the humanities, but to understand that it's not simplifying what we do, but translating what we do into a new key.
- [46:54]
A
Joseph Luzi, thank you for sharing your story with us and thank you for being on Old School.
- [46:59]
B
Thank you very much.