Dante at Dusk

by Nicolette L. Cagle, October 9, 2026, Ravenna, Italy

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.”

Midway through the journey of our life,
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way had been lost.

—Dante, Inferno, I, 1–3

In midlife, old texts take on new meaning.

Revisiting Thornton Wilder’s Our Town brought tears to my eyes from beginning to end. I expected the everyday tragedy, but I hadn’t anticipated how the emotions would build and overlap as I recalled my first reading of the text with my high school best friend, and how we latched onto the line about going through life “two by two,” while simultaneously reckoning with how much closer the losses hooked into life (i.e., death) now loom, reading the play in my mid-40s rather than my mid-teens.

Rereading 1984 filled me with terror this time around. I had once read it as a condemnation of dictatorships and doctrines that were dying out. Thirty years later, I realized that I had been watching that bone-chilling world suckled and nursed into new life, a stercoraceous redux that puts the entire planet at risk.

Similarly, Dante’s Divine Comedy speaks across 700 years and wrings my heart. I never imagined that a poem written in terza rima in the Middle Ages, invoking a cosmology I don’t embrace, would be one of those impactful texts. But who hasn’t been lost in their own “dark wood” and spectacularly surprised to have strayed from their own “straight way”?

Useful, contemporary lessons are found in each section, even Paradiso. One passage cleverly “foretells” Dante’s own exile within the poem. It also speaks to the vulnerability of depending on others, an experience we may know ourselves, or might hope to understand more deeply:

“You will learn how salty another’s bread tastes,
and how hard a path it is
to descend and climb another’s stairs.”

—Paradiso, XVII, 58–60

Today, I stood before Dante’s grave, his bones carefully guarded through the ages, hidden by Franciscan friars from a Florentine delegation seeking their return, and sheltered centuries later from wartime bombs. For the evening reading beside the poet’s tomb, I joined others who, whether knowingly or not, have lived some aspect of Dante’s universal storytelling.

We listened to Cantos X and XI of the Inferno, encountering a politician still sparring with a political rival in Hell, followed by an explanation of violence, fraud, and treachery.

It was as if Dante had stepped beyond his sepulcher and met us on the misty cobblestone streets at dusk to remind us to beware, recall that what is wrong is wrong, and devote some part of our lives, as he did, to calling those wrongs out. 

May we heed the lessons of literature to avoid writing another tragic chapter in our books of life.