Dante Alighieri: The New Life

This brief volume didn't offer me a lot of literary pleasures in and of itself.  The type of love Dante enshrines here is of dubious character, for one thing.  I have, once or twice, felt the sort of overpowering obsession, the worshipful adoration that he tries to capture.  The object of such love very nearly seems like a gift from heaven; he can do no wrong, is free from flaws, and light seems to radiate from his very face.  But I have an advantage over Dante: those whom I have seen in such a light didn't die before I learned the truth.

Dante calls this experience "love", but he does so seemingly without consciousness of the blurriness of that word.  It is a cliche, but nonetheless a useful one, to draw attention to the fact that "I love pizza" and "I love Pablo" are referring to two very different things.  Any objective observer, or even a compromised one who knows of what ze speaks, will recognize in Dante's rapture something much more closely resembling the former than the latter.

Too often, we say, feel, or think that we love something, when in fact we merely desire it.  Did Dante love Beatrice?  How could he have?  They scarcely met.  This is not to say that his feelings for her were not real, or that they were not as powerful as he describes, simply that he has misidentified them.  I, for my part, love sushi in the sense that I desire it.  I love Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in the sense that I can never seem to get enough of them.  I have even told myself, in the literal sense of the thought arising in my mind unbidden, that I love Pablo.  This too turned out to be more accurately called desire.

Which begs the question "what is love?" The answer to that question is beyond both the scope of this reaction, and perhaps beyond my capacity to write about in any medium.  But I feel confident in my assessment that it is equally far from Dante's capacity to have written at the time of The New Life.